


Under the Hawthorn Tree

by odetteandodile



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Blow Jobs, Fae & Fairies, First Time, First Time Blow Jobs, Floriography, Grief/Mourning, Irish Folklore, Irish Sarah Rogers, M/M, Magical Realism, Modern Steve Rogers, Murder Mystery, Parent Death, Post-Serum Steve Rogers, Slow Burn, Temporary Character Death, Tender Forest Blow Jobs, fae bucky
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-23
Updated: 2019-05-30
Packaged: 2020-03-07 13:08:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 57,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18873817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/odetteandodile/pseuds/odetteandodile
Summary: There is a faerie tale of sorts, though it’s one known only by the Fair Folk themselves and a few others who know that they can’t tell it.It goes like this.A young man wanders into the woods one night, and wanders until he isn't a young man anymore—but something else.Seventy years later, another man follows him. Inside of a magic ring, they meet.(or, Bucky is a faerie—amongst other things—and Steve Rogers, as always, is helpless but to love him from the start)





	1. One

**Author's Note:**

> Hello everyone, and welcome to my CapRBB 2019 collaboration with the excellent and talented [starshieldfolder](https://starshieldfolder.tumblr.com/)! This story is first and foremost thanks to her art which inspired it all, I can't wait to share what she's made with you! 
> 
> This story is a special one for me, and flavored a little differently from anything else I've written. I really hope you all enjoy it! 
> 
> As always, beta thanks to @calendulae, and a special thank you for cheerleading from @deisderium. 
> 
> We'll be posting one chapter a day with the finale coming May 30th so stick around! (57k total wordcount!)

_A young soldier pauses in the dark lane, leaning against the low earthwork wall beside the hedgerow. The flare of his lighter briefly illuminates his face, despite his hand cupped around the flame attempting to block it. The momentary light from it is the brightest thing in the muted landscape, though it isn’t particularly late yet. The strict light restrictions in place for the past three weeks have ensured that the nights in this part of the country won’t be spotted with any of the usual glow from farmhouse windows or car headlights. Nothing is permitted that might allow the occasional flyovers of the Luftwaffe to learn anything about the Allies’ movements ahead of the coming invasion. The soldier—a sergeant by his stripes and a paratrooper by his jump wings—would be in trouble even for the small flicker of lighting the cigarette, if anyone were out here to catch him at it. Of course, that’s why he’s out here on his own._

_He sighs, letting out a long lungful of smoke from the cigarette that dissipates quickly into the misty night enveloping him. Since the new regulations cancelling all leave passes, it’s been near impossible to snatch a moment where he isn’t surrounded by his fellow soldiers. He’s taking a risk on this walk out into the deserted country lane—but it’s worth it, just for an hour of peace and a smoke he didn’t feel obligated to share with one of the many resentful Brits. American rations are like gold here in this country that’s been feeling the pinch of the German assault for too long. It’s not that he minds sharing the cigarettes, but it’s the constant sharing of space and air that he’s been longing for some respite from._

_He keeps walking, not heading in any particular direction except into the muffled gloom. He’ll have to turn back soon—it won’t do to go too far. He’s stretching the tenuous limits of their movement restrictions as it is. His boots hit with a dull thud in the muddy lane, and he pulls his jacket in tighter against the chill as he takes another long drag on the cigarette. Just to the end of this smoke, he tells himself, then he’ll turn back._

_Around him, the open fields have given way to densely wooded forest, only increasing the darkness of the night. There might have been moonlight to help him, if it weren’t for the dense clouds shrouding them. Still he can’t be sorry for that; the clouds hinder German planes as much as they do the Allies’._

_He walks somewhere between a stroll and a marching pace—the army has trained him too well to be able to move entirely leisurely at this point. His footsteps are the only sound in the muffling fog for several more minutes._

_It's only thanks to the utter silence that his ears immediately notice a soft noise from off to his right, coming from somewhere in the trees. He stops at once, alert._

_There's only quiet for another moment as he listens. He's just relaxing, ready to keep moving when he hears it again, and this time he's certain that it's a voice._

_Whoever it is is speaking low enough that he can't make out the words. He drops the last of his spent cigarette to the ground, and creeps toward the far wall toward where the voice came from. He waits, hands on the stone. A second voice—a woman’s—answers the first._

_He hesitates, thinking maybe he's just stumbled upon some tryst, a couple looking for the only privacy they can get with the village crawling with troops. But a small insistent part of him thinks it unlikely. He'd specifically chosen to leave the camp on the road leaving the far side of the town, and it doesn't make sense that anyone would have come this direction for their coupling when it meant passing through the troop camp and a higher likelihood of being stopped by an enthusiastic M.P. His heart beats faster._ Leave it alone Barnes, _he thinks. But he can't quite bring himself to walk away, curiosity and suspicion getting the best of him._

_He sighs, then silently hurdles over the wall into a crouch, making his way deeper into the trees toward the voices. From his pocket he digs the small clicker they've been issued—it's meant to be used in the days and weeks in the future when they're on the other side of the line, to identify each other in enemy territory before shooting at anyone._

_When he gets close enough he clicks it twice, waiting for any recognition—a responding click or maybe a low whisper of a codeword flash from a soldier trying to steal a moment with his girl. But there's none. And now when the voices speak again, he can make out the words—and the hairs on his neck raise at once. The woman is responding to the man in rapid, angry German._

_The man hisses something at her, cutting her off, and she responds in English this time with no hint of accent, ratcheting up his suspicions about what he's just stumbled on another notch. "I can't very well just march into the command tent and look at the maps now, can I?" she demands. "‘Cleaning woman’ only gets me so far you know, and the colonel isn't keeping anything in his rooms anymore so I—” the man cuts her off again in german. Sergeant Barnes' stomach drops with a sick feeling as they come into view around the trunk of a tree. He recognizes the woman from the village, though she has a scarf over her hair. He can't make out the man's face—but he's wearing the uniform of a British officer._

_He wavers at the edge of the scene, willing the man to turn around. After another hurried exchange however the officer hasn't, and he's filled with certainty that he needs to get back to the camp—he needs to report to his commander what he saw, the fact that there are spies in their midst will have to be enough and hopefully someone else can help identify the officer later..._

_He has just enough time to hear the branch that cracks behind him with the heavy footfall of a third conspirator approaching. He half turns, hand going to his sidearm but—_

_A white hot, searing pain catches fire below his left shoulder blade, pinning him to the spot as it blossoms and flares across his senses, blinding him._

_He stumbles and turns, swallowing convulsively. He can't make out the face above the knife, pain clouding his eyes already, even before it plunges again between his ribs, sliding through the layers of his jacket and parting his skin and muscle to lodge there._

_The hand releases the knife, and his own come up of their own accord to grasp at the handle of it like an anchor. The dark figure swims in his vision as he staggers back, gasping. He can't tell if the heat of it is his blood flowing between his fingers or the knife or the pain itself._

_He falters back two more steps between a pair of trees into a small clearing. His ears are roaring and he doesn't notice as his boots crash through a small ring of brightly colored mushrooms--vivid, somehow, even in this muted night—before he crumples to the ground._

_His fall jars the knife between his ribs as he lands at the base of a small sapling, his body shaking the bare branches of it with the impact._

_But he doesn't notice that either. The pain is vanishing too, along with the last hazy vision of dark tree trunks in his eyes. He can't feel his hands anymore, or his lungs, or the cold._ I can't feel anything, _is the last thread of thought that he manages before everything around him seems to howl once—and go dark._

Steve snaps a final photo of the massive, crumbling oak tree and lets the camera drop back against his chest. He jots down a note about it in his notepad, and then tucks it back into his pocket before pushing forward, deeper into the undergrowth choking this section of the woods. 

He's far enough in now that the trees grow together haphazardly, and tangles of creeping vine climb from the bough of one straight into the arms of its neighbors overhead. He thinks it might even be raining, if the sound high above him is anything to go by. But down here under the lush roof of old growth he's practically dry, the damp, mossy ground protected from any direct precipitation aside from the most insistent downpours.

He glances at his watch, surprised to see how late it actually is. He's been sheltered by the half-gloom of the woods for the better part of the day. On the forest floor where the branches keep out the light as well as the rain, he's felt like the day has been in perpetual twilight. But apparently time’s been passing after all, and pretty soon the dark outside is going to match the dusk in here. Still, he's got a little time before he has to turn back.

Steve steps between the twin trunks of a pair of crooked beech trees and pauses to lift his camera for another photograph of the lush tumble of ferns banked up against them. He makes another note on his pad and sighs. So far nothing he's seen out here poses any problem for the plans to clear it. Which is good for Peggy and the development firm that hired her, Steve supposes, but it's bittersweet for him. He'd gotten into this job to keep beautiful things from being destroyed in the name of human expansion when he can—but sometimes there's no help for it. If he doesn't find anything rare or irreplaceable or on the protected species list there's nothing he can do but file his report and feel a little sorry over it.

Steve sighs, and leans against a tree trunk to take a swig from his water bottle.

He's grateful to Peggy for getting him this gig, he really is. It isn't like her architecture firm doesn't have environmental consultants on their call list a lot closer to home. 

And it's not like he was hurting for work back in the states. Building is booming. But Peggy had known as well as Steve did that he needed to get away from New York for a while.

She'd flown over for Sarah's funeral, and even helped him the week after in boxing up his mother's things—what was left in her apartment anyway. Sarah had spent many of the first weeks following her diagnosis cleaning things out (for Steve's sake, he knows) before she got too weak to do it. Before she had to leave the apartment entirely for a hospital bed, and then a hospice room. Steve will never be able to thank Peggy enough for that—for being there for him then. Of course she'd never accept it if he tried.

Just like she wouldn't take no for an answer a month later when she'd called him up and informed him that her firm was hiring him for an environmental impact report outside of a town in the English countryside, and that he'd be on a flight the next Monday.

He'd been in too much of a fog of grief still even to question her, he’d simply packed a bag and boarded the plane. 

But it's been a couple of weeks now breathing sharp, country spring air and wandering misty fields and eating dinners with Peggy and Angie where he tries his best but still catches them sharing concerned glances over his head when they think he isn't looking. So now he can probably admit that yeah, he needed _something_. 

And if part of him still thinks that the _something_ that he really needs is just to rewind the clock so that he can talk to his mom again...well at least he knows which way is up enough to think it.

It's been— _nice_ isn't really a word he can use, but something like it—being close to his mom's home. Steve's thought about that a lot in since he got here. Peggy wasn't actually ready for him to start his report, so he's spent a good amount of time just rambling through the grey-green landscape. He knows logically that he's _not_ really anywhere near County Kerry where Sarah actually grew up, but it's still a lot closer than Brooklyn was. Closer than he's ever been to the land she always called _home_ , right up to her death, almost thirty years since she'd left it for America with her infant son.

It's the trees, Steve thinks, that make him feel closer to her now. Steve understands trees. And the ones here are so different from the ones he's used to in his work in New York. Even the ones that grow there too, the beeches and oaks, have a different feel. Steve likes to think these woods are something like the ones Sarah might have known back home, and loved. Because he got his love of green things from her, even when it was through her sighing over how much greener things were back home than anywhere they could see in a day's drive from Crown Heights.

Steve swallows hard around the painful lump in his throat and takes another gulp of water. It doesn't do much. It's not that kind of block. He'd think he would be used to it by now, but no matter how many times a day it happens, thinking about his mom brings a tight fist of hurt under his sternum.

Steve shakes himself and tucks the water bottle away with a huff. Work, he can do some work. Work is good. And it's the least he can do for Peggy, now that his part of the project has _actually_ started, to try and do it well for her.

Steve pushes through another stand of oaks, picking his way carefully through a tangle of roots each fighting for space, and finds himself at the edge of a small natural clearing.

Thanks to some quirk of soil or luck, the dense ferns carpeting the ground peter out along with the trees, making a little glade maybe twenty feet across where the ground is nearly flat. The center of it is occupied by one large, impressive tree—a hawthorn in full bloom. A slight breeze whispers through its branches, scattering a lacy fall of petals, almost in invitation. It's gorgeous, and it stands out starkly from the dark green and brown of everything around it, standing alone in the circle of earth as if it knows it isn't quite like its neighbors.

Steve lifts his camera to take a picture before stepping forward, but then frowns, glancing down at the screen. The photo is dark, way too dark to see any detail other than the hazy white glow of the thing against a background of muddy muted blue. He glances up at the sliver of sky he can see through the branches above him and realizes that it's gone a full, royal navy. The sun's definitely set, and now that he's realized it he can feel the night chill setting in too, nipping at the edges of his coat.

He gives a regretful look to the hawthorn. The bloom won't last long, especially if they have any more windy days to knock all the blossoms down. But there's no point in taking photos now, so he'll have to come back if he wants a proper look at it anyway.

He makes a note of the coordinates on his GPS before heading back the way he came.

Steve takes a last look over his shoulder at the clearing before slipping into the darkness between the oaks, and the white branches of the tree shiver for a moment in an unseen breath of wind. 

Steve thinks absurdly for a moment that it's like the tree is sighing at his departure.

"I'll be back," he whispers. Then he shakes his head, laughing at himself, and points his feet back toward town.

It’s full dark by the time he picks his way back through the woods and onto the road. The lights of the town ahead are a soft glow even through the rising fog beginning to swirl around Steve’s feet. _It’s going to be another damp night_ , he thinks, before snorting at the pointlessness of that observation. Every night he’s been here has been damp. It’s a damp country. 

Peggy had set him up in a small flat near the edge of town, close to her temporary offices and not too far from the little townhouse she and Angie occupy. She’d offered him their guest room at first, but he’d declined as gently but firmly as he could and she hadn’t pushed it. He appreciates their concern, but he doesn’t think he could handle it at all hours. 

Mourning is a state that demands time and space to fill on his own. Steve’s grateful that they both seem to get that. 

His apartment is a sparse but comfortable studio, occupying the upper floor of what he assumes was once the carriage house behind a white stucco home on a quiet side street. The older woman who lives alone in the main house is quiet, and lets him keep to himself most of the time, though she’s friendly enough the times he crosses paths with her in the tidy little herb garden between her kitchen and the stairs to his flat. 

Tonight the house is dark but for one soft light in an upper window as Steve lets himself in the side gate. 

He’s picking his way between the rosemary shrub and a mint plant which has decided to sprawl well outside the bounds of the garden bed when his foot strikes something that clatters away over the pavers with a sharp sound in the quiet garden. 

Steve frowns and pulls out his phone to shine a light on whatever it was. He spots a little china bowl in a faded pattern overturned, the liquid it had held now seeping into the moss between the stones as he rights it. 

He smiles softly, as he realizes what it was. The little dish of milk is spilled now, but he sets it back beside the planter box anyway and hopes his hostess won’t be too upset—and that the faeries forgive her for it too. Steve shakes his head fondly. His mom had held onto a lot of the old superstitions from her childhood. “The Fair Folk,” is what she’d called them. He didn’t know there were that many people around who still did things like this. As a kid he’d always loved it when Sarah would send him out very seriously with a bite of cake or a spare berry from their dinner to place with great ceremony on the fire escape of their apartment in Brooklyn as an offering.

“It doesn’t do any harm to make peace with the Fair Folk Steven, even here in the city you never know when they’re about,” she’d say. 

He’d tried to tell her, when he got to be about ten, the age when belief in things like Santa Claus and the Tooth faerie became something to scoff at with his friends, that she didn’t need to keep indulging in faerie stories any more for him. He was a big kid now. Sarah had been affronted—almost angry with him, in a way she rarely was outside of the times he got sent home for fighting in school—and told him that “big kids” were even more responsible for how they treated their neighbors, including the ones that didn’t want to be seen. He’d been so surprised at her reaction that he hadn’t questioned it again. But as an adult he’d started to look on the superstitions with a soft fondness. His mother was such a pragmatic, no-nonsense woman in so many ways—a nurse who approached things with practical sense and efficiency. It had been endearing to realize that for all her groundedness there was still a side of her that was a young girl from the Irish countryside, and that sometimes the stories of childhood are things that you don’t grow out of. 

So he crouches down and tucks the dish back into its place carefully, because that’s what Sarah Rogers would have done. 

A low scratching catches his attention as he stands, and a movement along the fenceline draws his eye. He shines his light up at it, and the cat making its way down the length of the wooden beam freezes in the light, glaring back at him. It’s a pretty thing, with a coat that’s almost red. It peers back at him with luminous, resentful eyes before yowling once and disappearing over the other side and out of the garden. 

Steve wonders if maybe he was wrong about his hostess’ appeasement of the faeries after all. It might have been that cat’s dinner that he spilled. Whoops. 

Steve climbs the stairs to his door, suddenly feeling a lot more tired than he had a few minutes ago. He’d intended to get on his computer and put down all his notes from today into his report, but now he’s thinking he might hold off. 

He’s not sure he has much more in him than to scrounge up some dinner and maybe read something until he falls asleep. Steve frowns, flicking on the lightswitch, and peers at his tiny, makeshift kitchen. Now that he thinks about it, he’s not positive there’s anything _to_ scrounge. 

As if in direct response to the thought, his phone starts buzzing in his hand, Peggy’s name flashing up on the screen. He swipes to answer as he drops his bag and coat by the door. 

“What’s up Peg?” he asks, already moving toward his pantry to assess the situation. 

“—nothing I can do except authorize the overtime to—oh Steve! Hello?” comes Peggy’s voice on the other end, clearly in the midst of at least one other conversation. 

“Yep I’m here,” he says again, a little louder. He shuffles through some of the cans of things in a cabinet. He’s got soup at least, and some bread in the freezer. It’s good enough not to have to go out again now that he’s in. 

“Oh good, sorry darling I meant to check in with you earlier but it’s been a bit of a mess—” she halts again, saying something indistinct this time away from the mouthpiece of the phone. 

“You okay?” Steve asks, brow creasing. 

“What? Oh, fine. I mean just the usual levels of fuckery. This project has been a nightmare I can’t wait to—but how did it go on your end today?” 

Steve shrugs, then realizes she can’t see him. “Went fine. Nothing super remarkable one way or another, gotta put my measurements in and stuff. I’ll have a better idea in a week or two probably.” 

Peggy sighs, “Well as long as there’s no bad news I’ll take it.”

“What’s wrong?” Steve tries again. “Anything I can do?”

“Just more bad luck I’m afraid,” Peggy says, and the noise around her lessens with the sound of a door shutting. “Had a palette of materials that came in _last week_ turn out to be rotted through when the crew went to unpack it today. It’s been one thing after another like that. Just crossing my fingers that once we get all of this section framed in, clearing and starting on the next piece will go smoother. My timeline’s been absolutely shattered, I had to withdraw a bid I was planning for the fall because I just don’t think this is going to wrap anywhere close to schedule.”  

“Hmm,” Steve says sympathetically as he rummages in his drawers for a can opener. “Guess there’s not much you can do about bad luck, huh.” 

“Suppose not,” Peggy says. “But I’m sorry, I really did mean to call about _you_. Are you home yet? Do you want to come round for dinner? If you do I can leave the office now, get back to it in the morning—”

“I’m good,” Steve interrupts, gently. “Just got in, I’m gonna call it an early night.” 

“Are you sure? Have you had a proper meal today?” Peggy asks, her tone dubious. 

Steve gives a wry puff of laughter. “Yes _Peggy_ , I am about to eat dinner as we speak.” _Only a half lie_ , he thinks. “I am in fact a grown up and can sometimes manage to do that without help.” 

“Mmm, sometimes,” Peggy says, and he can hear the smile in her tone. 

“Really Peg, I’m fine. I’ll see you guys Friday like we said.” 

“Alright, but it needn’t wait til then if you want the company before.” 

“I know. Seriously, I’m good, I’ve been hiking around all day, I just wanna sack out.” 

“Okay,” Peggy’s voice is soft now. “You’ll let me know if you need anything? For—for the report?” He knows she doesn’t mean for the report, and he knows she knows it too. 

“Will do. Night Peggy.” 

“Goodnight Steve.” 

He hangs up first. He’s pretty sure Peggy will stay on the line just in case he changes his mind if he doesn’t. 

His dinner, while underwhelming, has the virtue of being ready fast, and Steve eats standing at the little butcher block island, elbows resting on the scrubbed wood as he pages idly though his notes from today, not making much headway with them. Eventually he gives up, shuffling the papers and dropping them onto his desk. 

He considers putting the kettle on for some tea, under the pretense of not climbing into bed at—he checks his watch and rolls his eyes—nine o’clock. But he gives up on that too, knowing he won’t actually drink it. 

Instead he swipes open his phone and searches for a playlist of Irish folk music—it’s one he’s been returning to a lot lately. He sets the phone on his nightstand and lets the mournful strains of the fiddle and flute wrap around him as he gets into his pajamas. 

He has to duck his head to climb into his bed, tucked under a low eave along one side of the room. Steve had knocked his forehead on it a couple of times the first week he was here, before he got the hang of it. Now he’s used to keeping an eye out for door frames and random low sections of ceiling wherever he goes. None of these old buildings were built with someone of his height in mind, something Angie likes to tease him about—usually right before she asks him to get something down from a tall shelf for her. 

The sound of real rain begins to patter against the roof above Steve’s head just as he curls in under the blankets, and he flops back against the pillow with his eyes shut, listening. He cracks an eye and peers at the book he’s been reading (trying to read), perched on his nightstand. 

After a staring contest with it that he doesn’t win, he sighs and instead just turns off the bedside lamp and snuggles down further into his narrow bed. 

He leaves the music on low, letting the playlist run itself to the end. As he drifts, lulled by the music and the rhythmic tapping of the rain, he finds himself thinking again about the white glow of the hawthorn tree in its clearing in the woods. 

_Tomorrow_ , he thinks, hazily, _tomorrow_. 


	2. Two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's the [incredible art](https://starshieldfolder.tumblr.com/post/185002757061/art-made-for-the-caprbb-and-now-part-of-an-amazing) of Steve's first glimpse of Bucky that inspired this fic! Go give starshieldfolder some love :)

When Steve wakes up the next morning, it takes a long time for him to realize it _is_ morning at all, it’s so dark out still. And the rain, which had been a lullaby through the night, is a lot less charming as it still pounds down on the roof of his flat today, darkening the sky outside his windows. 

It’s not like he’s never walked a site in the rain before, Steve’s perfectly capable of it if need be. But he’s not on such a tight timeline that he can’t afford to lose a day indoors, maybe spending time compiling his notes and formatting his plans for the rest of the inspection in the safety of the apartment instead. 

Or that’s what he tells himself as he makes slow progress through the morning and into the early part of the afternoon. Really, his bones just feel heavier today. 

It’s sadness, is what it is. Just the heavy burden of grief making its presence known with a force it hasn’t in several days. 

It’s exhausting, Steve’s found, being sad. He feels slow and stupid with it. It’s a lot like the fevers that had plagued him as a kid—the burning, achey unsettledness of them. 

It settles like a mantle around him as he types away on his laptop, and unseeingly heats up some kind of freezer meal for lunch. His flat feels cold and strange, the unfamiliarity of it getting under his skin until he’s half-wild with the sense of _not right_ about it. Of being here alone, of not being able to go _home_ because _home_ is interred in the Holy Cross Cemetery of Brooklyn. 

When it was fresh Steve had felt like he was getting acquainted with grief, it was all new. Now he knows the shape of it, like a track in the floor that he can’t stop walking from one end to the other in his mind. 

With that mental image, Steve stumbles up from his desk, shoving his chair back. The flat suddenly seems very small and cagelike, trapping him with his thoughts. 

He glances at the window and finds that if it hasn’t exactly cleared, the rain has at least let up. It’s as good an excuse as he’s going to get to escape for a little bit, clear his head and reset, something he’s been learning he has to make himself do when he sinks a little too low into his mind. 

He shuffles into outdoor clothes, not really paying much attention as he pulls on a particularly ugly fair isle sweater Peggy had bought him a few years back, as a joke the last Christmas she’d spent with Steve and his mom in the States during their final year of college. It’s warm at least, which is why he’d packed it in the first place. He tugs on his waterproof jacket and flips up the hood, not bothering with his usual bag of equipment aside from pocketing the GPS and his notepad. He’s not actually intending to get any work done anyway. Just to stretch his legs and clear his head a bit. 

Still as he leaves behind the last tidy rows of houses, legs pushing him forward into the shimmery grey afternoon, he finds that he’s headed toward the place he’d left the woods last night by habit. Steve doesn’t fight the impulse. He has nowhere better he needs to be. 

He jams his hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched against the silvery chill. The trees lining the road on either side of him stand like silent sentinels. He feels somehow, absurdly, less lonely out here than he had in the confines of the flat. _The woods are lovely, dark and deep_. 

Steve spots the trio of slender birch trees he thinks he recognizes from where he’d emerged at the edge of the forest last night, and he confirms with a glance at his GPS. 

The wet earth seems to swallow up all the sound of his boots as Steve hops the low earthwork wall and slips between the first of the trees. Absent, too, is yesterday’s breeze which had whispered through the leaves like a friend. Today it’s all stillness and hush in the wake of the storm, like the world holding its breath.  

Steve weaves between roots and over the occasional fallen trunk grown over with moss, letting the spicy scent of ferns soothe him. 

He loses track of exactly where he’s going, but his feet apparently know the way without looking at the GPS. Still he’s surprised when he steps under the low skirt of a yew tree and finds himself looking across the open space of the little hawthorn glade. 

Steve lets the yew branch drop behind him, gazing up and up in awe to the soft white fingers of the thing stretching toward the forest roof. It’s by far the largest hawthorn he’s seen growing wild—and its trunk, too, is thick and solid, unlike most of its delicate looking brethren. He wonders how old it is. It’s truly impressive. 

He steps forward into the glade, wanting to get a better look at the growth pattern from under the shelter of its branches, when his boot plants in something soft. 

Steve looks down, curiously, and notes a little outcropping of dull, red mushrooms spreading away around the edge of the clearing in a perfect, spotted circle around the tree. He steps over more carefully this time onto the soft green of the glade floor.

Suddenly the air, which had been still and quiet, stirs again with a soft prickle of a breeze, causing the low branches of the flowering tree to sway gently as if beckoning him. Steve lifts an arm and moves one aside, stepping in underneath to peer up at the towering trunk of the thing. 

He still can’t believe the size of it—he wishes he’d brought his measuring tape after all, or sample containers for some soil, there must be a reason for its unusually successful growth. The width of the trunk looks like it could hold its own against some of its english oak neighbors. He reaches up toward a branch and plucks a sprig of blossoms, rolling it between his fingers and inspecting the broken end of it…

“What are you doing to my tree?” 

A faintly amused voice shatters the silence, sending Steve’s heart skittering as he starts back, eyes darting for the speaker. 

There’s no one else in the clearing, and Steve quickly swipes at his eyes with the hand not clutched convulsively around the hawthorn sprig. 

“I asked,” comes the voice again, “What are you doing to my tree down there?” 

This time Steve’s eyes do find the man who has spoken—but the sight that greets him only makes him rub at them again, certain that his vision or his mind must be failing him.

About fifteen feet above him, a man sits perched among the boughs of the hawthorn, where Steve would have sworn nothing had been before. He’s impossibly beautiful. Added to that the fact that the man isn’t wearing a stitch of clothing, Steve’s absolutely convinced he’s hallucinating. 

The man—or…or whatever he is—tilts his head and kicks his heel against the trunk of the tree, staring back down at Steve with a half smile curling his mouth. His pose is relaxed, and he seems at most intrigued or amused, not perturbed by Steve’s presence at all. Steve’s mouth opens and closes a few times silently, and the man’s smile widens to crinkle around his—very, extremely—blue eyes. 

“You could get yourself into trouble wandering into strange faerie rings you know,” the man remarks. 

“I—what?” Steve asks, helplessly lost. He’s not sure where to look, though the man doesn’t seem to be concerned about his state of undress or expanse of his olive skin on display. His limbs are long and leanly muscled, and there’s obvious grace in the way he rests languidly among the branches. Steve’s eyes dart away guiltily from the curve of a calf, back to the man’s face. It isn’t better. The man is looking back at Steve, and he doesn’t bother to hide the fact that he’s looking him over, making Steve shift uncomfortably, rubbing at the back of his neck. 

“The faerie ring,” the man says after a moment, and Steve is confused again, having completely forgotten the initial statement. The man raises his eyebrows in faint amusement. “The mushrooms?” he says, waving a hand in the direction of the circle. _That’s right_ , Steve thinks, _mushrooms growing in the round like that are faerie circles_. He’d forgotten that he ever knew that, though it comes back with perfect clarity now in light of this bizarre situation. 

The man smiles, seeing Steve’s comprehension. “Never know what you’re bargaining for when you step in one of these things blind. You’re lucky it’s just me you found in here.”

“Oh—I—am I?” Steve asks, stupidly. The man tips his head back in a laugh that bares his long throat. 

“That’s a fair question I guess.” His eyes glint with mirth. 

“It is?” Steve grimaces and swears internally as soon as the words are out—he sounds like a complete idiot. He tries to marshal his scattered wits into something that can deal at least a _little_ better with this conversation—however surreal. 

The man looks down at him consideringly for another long moment. Then he nods with some kind of decision, reaching up to grip a branch and pulling himself out of his crouch in a fluid motion. Steve looks hastily away, ears burning. 

When he looks back, the man has slipped away between the branches around the other side of the trunk. 

He reappears at the foot of it, and Steve immediately loses the thread of his resolve to stop being dumbstruck as he walks toward him. The man is now fully clothed—jeans, boots, and an ugly fair isle sweater…

Steve looks down at himself and back up at the man, confirming. What he’s wearing now is a mirror image of Steve’s own outfit, sans raincoat. Steve gapes. The man shrugs and tucks a strand of his long dark hair behind his ear, for the first time looking slightly hesitant. 

“You seemed uncomfortable,” he says, “I thought this would help.” 

“Um. Thank you,” Steve says, unsure of what else there is _to_ say to that. The man’s accent is odd too, and it occurs to Steve that maybe it’s also an imitation. 

The man’s hesitance vanishes again under another twist of a smile. He holds out his hand in what Steve recognizes as an offer of a handshake after a beat too long. 

“I’m Bucky,” the man says, grinning as Steve lurches forward to take his hand. He drops the crushed hawthorn sprig hastily, and he can feel his palm slightly sap sticky against Bucky’s. A small thrum of something runs through him at the contact, and another sigh of a breeze shivers through the glade, ruffling Steve’s hair and setting the hawthorn blossoms whispering over them. 

“I’m…Steve,” Steve says faintly. “Steve Rogers.” 

Bucky squeezes his fingers once more, eyes sharp and fixed on Steve’s face. 

“Steve,” he says. He lets go, and Steve’s hands move to clasp in front of himself automatically in reaction to Bucky’s touch. 

“What—what are you?” Steve finally gasps, unable to stop himself. He regrets it as soon as it’s out of his mouth, or more specifically as soon as it’s out of his mouth and Bucky quirks one wry eyebrow at him. 

“That’s a bit rude isn’t it?” Bucky says, though there’s still laughter in his tone. Steve feels entirely wrong-footed. He hasn’t exactly been great at interactions with other people lately, and he certainly isn’t on his game enough to gracefully navigate one with someone to whom the label “people” seems like it can only be loosely applied. 

Maybe this whole thing is in his head. Maybe he’s cracked after all, really and truly. In that case though he wishes his mind would have produced a hallucination where he could feel like less of a bumbling moron. Also maybe less handsome. A less handsome hallucination that wasn’t smiling at Steve like people smile at very small children learning to do simple tasks—that would have been good. 

“Sorry,” Steve says, ducking his head again. 

Bucky shrugs, not looking too put out about it. “Luckily I know what you are—humans can’t help but be rude most of the time. You don’t know any better.” He pauses, tilting his head again at Steve in that measuring way. His eyes are intense and unblinking, and Steve shuffles his feet, wondering what it is that Bucky sees. “As for me,” Bucky says, now looking away and back up toward the inner reaches of the hawthorn. “I think you’d know me best as a dryad. If you have a word for me at all anymore. Seems like most of you have forgotten all about The Fair Folk and the old ways—out of sight, out of mind I suppose.” 

Steve’s mental encyclopedia of mythology and lore isn’t perfect, despite having grown up with Sarah Rogers and all her quirks. He would’ve said dryads were a greek thing—like, with the satyrs and stuff. But as Bucky is here in the midst of a glen—and a faerie ring, Steve thinks again, a bit hysterically—in England, he’s not going to embarrass himself further by voicing it aloud. 

So he instead swallows, takes a deep breath, and decides to make conversation. With the dryad. As pleasantly as possible. 

“Is this—erm—your tree then?” 

“Mmm,” Bucky says. Then his hand darts out, grasping one of Steve’s before Steve can register the movement, and Bucky is pulling him back toward the trunk of it. “Come’ere,” Bucky says. 

Bucky drops his hand, and again Steve is compelled to touch the place where Bucky’s fingers had been cool against his. Bucky looks up and Steve follows his gaze to the sturdy bough about four feet over Steve’s head. 

“Think you can make it?” Bucky asks. 

“I—what?”

Instead of answering the question, Bucky springs upward. Steve can’t even track the motion of his body, to him it seems that one moment Bucky is standing beside him peering up at the branch, and the next he’s crouched on it, looking down at Steve expectantly. Bucky smiles at the dismay on Steve’s face, then hooks one hand around the branch above him and leans down precariously to offer the other to Steve. 

Steve looks at the hand for a moment, and then up at the strange unlikely figure Bucky cuts. He’s so clearly something Other that for a moment Steve imagines that if he reaches up to accept that grip, his hand will simply go straight through and close on air, proving that Bucky really is nothing but a trick of the light and his own frayed imagination. 

But by instinct Steve’s hand reaches up of its own accord to grip Bucky’s, and finds himself being pulled upward with surprising strength just in time to hook his legs over the branch clumsily, not entirely avoiding a few jabs of its thorns through his jeans. He flails a little bit as he gets his feet under him, mimicking Bucky’s crouch, and he’s not sure if he imagines the soft snort from Bucky as he steadies himself at last. 

“You good?” Bucky asks. 

Steve nods, trying to look casual despite his white-knuckled grip on the branch above him. It’s been a long time since he climbed a tree not as part of a job, and he usually has equipment and ropes and stuff with him then. 

“Good,” Bucky says cheerfully, before moving off around the other side of the trunk, working his way higher in the branches as he goes. 

Steve doesn’t know what he’s gotten himself into. But there’s a small spark of something like a dare in how Bucky climbed off without offering another helping hand or asking Steve if he could manage. And Steve may not be the skinny, sickly kid with something to prove that he was—but he still doesn’t like backing down from a challenge when he can help it either. So he follows after Bucky as quickly as he can, setting his hands purposefully between the scattered thorns.

Bucky doesn’t go too far though. Steve hauls himself up between two branches and finds the other man sitting in a wide space where the hawthorn’s trunk splits into a wide fork. It’s created a smooth flat basin big enough for the two of them to sit comfortably enough with both of their knees drawn up. Bucky sits with his back to one of the two halves of the trunk stretching upwards, so Steve climbs up into the space and sets his back to the other, crooking up one knee and letting the other dangle down into open air. 

Bucky’s eyes are on Steve again with that same curious expression, and Steve for the life of him can’t imagine what it is about him that’s so intriguing. After a moment he shifts nervously. He feels like he can’t look directly at Bucky’s face for too long, and he’s careful that his crooked knee not do anything as impertinent as bump up against Bucky’s even in the small confines of the space. 

“So uh, what now?” 

“What do you mean?” Bucky asks.

“Shouldn’t you be—I don’t know, telling me riddles or something? Asking if I want to play a game in exchange for wishes?” 

Bucky gives another sharp bark of laughter, the full-throated one that tips his head back against the smooth bark of the hawthorn. 

“I don’t do wishes. And I’d offer a game only I haven’t got a deck of cards or anything.” He pauses, considering. “Mmm a riddle…” 

Steve waits intently while Bucky thinks. He may not remember as much as he wishes he did (especially right now) about his mom’s stories about the Fair Folk, but he’s pretty sure they generally have some sort of game to play with unwary humans who stumble across their path. 

Bucky sits up and squares his shoulders, leveling a steady gaze at Steve. 

“Time flies like an arrow,” Bucky begins, seriously. Steve sits forward now too, mind already racing. Bucky pauses. “Fruit flies like a banana.” 

Steve blinks back at him, nonplussed. Bucky’s somber expression cracks a little as the corner of his mouth twitches. Steve’s mouth drops open, realizing that was it. That was the joke. 

“Outside of a dog a book is man’s best friend,” Bucky says before Steve can formulate a response. “Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.” 

Steve makes a strangled noise of consternation in the back of his throat, and Bucky’s face breaks into a full, sideways grin. 

“Are these—are you just telling me _Groucho Marx_ jokes?” 

Bucky snickers and settles himself back against the branch. “I don’t like riddles, Steve. Where I come from they usually have strings attached. Guess I could try and recite some Yeats for you instead? But I like Groucho Marx.” 

Steve laughs helplessly, and lets his own posture relax to slump back across from Bucky. Now he doesn’t try to keep himself from looking at him more closely, curiosity and surprise driving away his awkward embarrassment. 

“Where you come from…?” Steve lets the question hang in the air. Bucky looks away. 

“The Good People only play games they can win. It’s not very sporting.” Bucky shakes his head, and a shadow of some kind passes over his face, making Steve tense again. But then he shakes himself, and returns his gaze to Steve, his expression pleasant once more. “Anyway it’s your turn.” 

“For what?” 

“A joke, Steve. Fair is fair.” 

Steve lets out a bemused puff of laughter. “God, I don’t even know where to—”

“ _Steve_ ,” Bucky says, and his voice is chiding but playful. “You seem to be pretty ignorant about how all of this works—not your fault, most humans are these days—but let me educate you. When the Fair Folk offer you a gift it’s courteous to give something in exchange. And I want a joke, so ante up.” 

Steve shakes his head, but he’s smiling anyway—and it strikes him, in a distant corner of his mind, how strange and unfamiliar the sensation has become. When had he laughed last without it being at least a little blighted by an undercurrent of sorrow? He isn’t sure. 

“Okay,” he says, mind scrambling for something clever. For some reason he can’t think of a single thing that he’s found funny in his adult life. So he shrugs—Bucky gave him tired out Groucho jokes, so it seems only fair that in exchange he’s have to put up with the best Steve’s got, which is a joke he remembers falling out of his desk laughing about when Billy Garson told it to him in the fifth grade. 

“Where does General Washington keep his armies?” He asks, suppressing a grin. 

“Where?” 

Steve pauses for dramatic effect. “Up his… _sleevies_.” 

Bucky stares at him. Steve stares back. Then Bucky’s face breaks into that bright grin and he laughs through a groan, covering his eyes with his hand. 

“Oh Steve that’s…that’s truly terrible. Thank you.” 

Steve grins too now, the mechanics coming easier now as he shakes the rust off of it, and he finds that it’s a feeling he doesn’t want to let go of quite yet. 

“Alright sorry, let me try again,” he says, and Bucky looks at him through a crack between long fingers. “Um right. Follow up question. What would George Washington be doing if he were alive right now?” 

“What?” Bucky asks, his tone extremely suspicious. 

“Scratching at the lid of his coffin.” 

This time Bucky brings up his other hand so that both are covering his face entirely as his shoulders shake. “ _Jesus Christ_ that’s bad. That’s really, truly terrible. You’re lucky I’m not the vindictive sort because that is _not_ an adequate trade for Groucho.” He pulls his hands down and glares at Steve, but his eyes are sparkling. 

Steve ducks his head, still chuckling. “You’re right, I’m sorry. Nobody’s asked me to tell them a joke in a long time. Like, since middle school maybe. So that’s really all I got.” 

“You’re forgiven,” Bucky says. “But only because you laughed at your own material despite its stupidity.” 

“That’s magnanimous of you,” Steve says dryly. 

Bucky’s smile fades a little. “Not particularly. You just looked like you might need a laugh. When you first walked in here.” 

Steve feels his own grin falter and fall. “Did I?” The question comes out as little more than a whisper. The fist of hurt under his breastbone doesn’t return quite yet, but the memory of it does. And the knowledge that it will. 

Bucky nods solemnly. “You have a nice laugh. I’m sorry for whatever is keeping you from it.” 

“Oh.” Steve says, thrown again off-balance and unsure what to make of Bucky’s seeming kindness, or the accuracy of his intuition. “Thank you.” And because he can’t handle the directness of Bucky’s look so obviously cutting through him, and because he isn’t ready to let this strange bubble of lightness of being burst quite yet, he looks away up into the branches of the hawthorn. “This—your tree is beautiful. I’ve never seen a hawthorn like this.” 

“Is that what you were thinking about down there, prowling around and picking at it?” Bucky asks easily, letting Steve turn the conversation. 

Steve nods, running his fingertips over the whorls of the bark. “Was wondering what the soil was like around here, that let it do so well. But I guess that’s the—” he darts a glance at Bucky, unable to believe he’s about to say the words, “—the magic?” 

Bucky’s mouth twists sideways in something a little too pained to be a smile. He looks away. “Magic. A few other ingredients I wouldn’t recommend to the average gardener if they can avoid it.” 

“Bucky,” Steve says, hesitantly, “What is—do you…” 

Before he can finish the question Bucky shifts, face returning to a look of aloof amusement and shaking his head as he rises to his feet. “It’s almost dark Steve. Time for you to get back home.” 

Steve scrambles up, trying to follow the abrupt change as Bucky swings himself down through the branches with the grace of an acrobat. He glances up between the delicate scalloped edges of the flowering hawthorn and sees that the sky above is in fact sinking into a dusky lavender. So Steve moves after him, significantly slower and less fluidly, hopping from branch to branch like a baby bird that hasn’t quite got the guts yet to try and fly. 

When he reaches the final bough, the one Bucky had pulled him onto before, he pauses for a moment before jumping to the ground—it seems a lot further off on the way down than it had on the way up. Bucky is bent over near the foot of the tree, fiddling with something in the tall soft grass there. He straightens and raises an eyebrow at Steve. 

Steve takes a deep breath and jumps, trying to hit the ground with his knees bent and land as nimbly as he can. His right ankle twists a little bit, sending him skittering to the side before he catches his balance, but he keeps on his feet and he thinks that’s the main thing. 

Bucky steps toward him, close enough that Steve can see how dark Bucky’s lashes are against his cheek as he lowers his eyes. Steve’s struck anew as the fading light hits the sharp edges of Bucky’s cheekbones and jaw by the impossible, unearthly beauty of him, and his breath catches a little despite himself. 

But Bucky simply reaches out and tucks the thing he was cradling in one hand into the buttonhole on the pocket of Steve’s raincoat—it’s a white flower, the broad petals so thin they’re almost translucent in the fading twilight. _Anemone Nemorosa_ , Steve’s brain supplies helpfully. A wood anemone. Bucky’s hand smooths lightly, just a quick motion, beside the flower down Steve’s chest. Then he steps back. 

“I would like,” Bucky says, and his voice is oddly formal now, “if you found your way back here Steve Rogers.” 

“I—alright,” Steve says, shoving his hands into his pockets. 

Bucky smiles, but this time it’s a little wan, and Steve doesn’t know what to make of it. “We’ll see.” He glances up toward the dimming sky, before looking back at Steve gravely. “You should go straight back when you leave here. Don’t tarry. Be well, Steve.”

And with that, he reaches upwards, and it’s like the tree bows to meet him, his body arching away lithely between the leaves. 

Steve turns, his feet obeying Bucky’s command even if his mind hasn’t managed yet to process what just happened. 

He reaches the edge of the glade, poised to step over the the bright scatter of red mushrooms. But he pauses, looking back over his shoulder at the hawthorn, swaying gently with a wind that doesn’t seem to touch anything else around it. 

There’s no sign of Bucky, and Steve’s already beginning to wonder if the man was ever really even there in the first place. He brushes a featherlight fingertip across one pink-veined petal of the anemone in his buttonhole. 

And then he turns himself toward town.


	3. Three

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to those of you who have already left comments! I appreciate you so much :) 
> 
> And now, we get a few answers about magic.

Steve sleeps well that night. Better, in fact, than he has in a lot of months.

He wakes up to the shocking sight of weak spring sunshine pouring in the small slitted window above his bed. And although morning is a very normal thing for most people to wake up to, it’s not normal for him these days, and it’s disorienting to realize he’d slept through the night without waking up to any nightmares or the unsettled sense of something _wrong_ that he realizes he can’t do anything about. 

He lies in bed for a few minutes, watching the dust motes dance in the light, and thinks about Bucky. 

The scene in the hawthorn feels distant and hazy now, much further removed than one day ought to make it. Like a dream. 

And maybe it was just that. 

It’s a much more sensical explanation for everything than believing that anything Bucky had said to him was the reality. _Magic_. The Fair Folk. 

It’s all a little too much of a miracle, and Steve stopped believing in those a while back. Not as long ago as he stopped believing in faeries, but close. 

And really, hadn’t his mother’s stories about the Fair Folk been on his mind, thanks to the milk dish he’d kicked over in the garden last night? Thanks to being in the strange and mystical landscape more or less of his mother’s childhood? It makes perfect sense to Steve in the harsh light of day that his mind would produce something like that—like a faerie ring and the most handsome man he’s probably ever seen to preside over it. His mind had clearly given him _exactly_ what he’d wanted, without realizing it. 

Steve groans, wiping his hands over his face with embarrassment, though at what precisely he isn’t sure. It just strikes him as vaguely embarrassing that he really is as close to cracking as Peggy and Angie have feared, and that he’s chafed at being treated like. Apparently they were right this whole time to worry about him—he really is so gone in grief that he’s tipped over into utter delusion. 

And yet…part of him wonders at himself actually being capable of producing anything so convincing. If his sorrow-addled mind had snapped under the strain, wouldn’t he rather have had a vision of his mom? Or even perhaps a magical being that could offer him some kind of balm or trade for her loss? 

Bucky had told him Groucho Marx jokes, and hoisted him up into the branches of the hawthorn. Steve isn’t sure he’s that creative. If he’d just been sleepwalking or seeing what he wanted to see, he doesn’t really think his hallucinations would have been that subtle. 

But he _had_ felt…light. In the fuzzy memory of the time he’d spent there. He’d felt peaceful in a way he hasn’t in…well, longer than he can be sure of. Before his mom’s diagnosis definitely. And he’s equally uncertain about trusting that feeling as he is certain that he craves feeling it again. 

Bucky had asked him to come back. Or rather, he’d said he hoped Steve would. Though he’d also seemed sad, like he didn’t really expect him to. Steve thinks a hallucination or a dream he’d come up with would definitely ask, but again, he doubts his ability to imagine the doubtful regret that came with it. 

He makes himself coffee, and examines the memory of the afternoon again after he’s had a hot shower and brushed his teeth, looking to see if it has faded any more around the edges in a way that confirms it all as a dream. 

It hasn’t. 

In fact, if anything certain pieces have come into sharper focus—though not the ones he’d been looking for. 

He can picture too clearly, for example, the muscle shifting under Bucky’s skin as he’d pulled Steve up onto the hawthorn bough. And the mercurial, shifting blue of his eyes that had slid to green when Steve made him laugh, and grey when he’d asked him about magic. He hadn’t realized he’d been paying such close attention to it at the time. 

Of course, he tells himself harshly as he swigs back the last of his coffee, if it was all in his head he wouldn’t have had to be paying attention then, all the memories he’s layering over it now might feel just as real as the experience had been in the moment. Which is to say not real at all. 

Still, if all of this is somehow about his mom and Steve is merely cracking under the weight of her absence, why does he feel in particular that he’d liked how Bucky had looked at him with only curiosity and no pity? He hasn’t had someone take an interest in him without that knowing look about them in some time. Partly because he’d cut out just about everyone besides those who knew what he was going through as his mom had declined. Peggy and Sam had really been the only people he’d made an effort to keep up to date with. Spending time with anyone who _didn’t_ know what to ask and what not to ask had felt too exhausting to consider. But he…had liked the freedom of that. Yesterday. With Bucky. Hadn’t he? 

He should really call Peggy. Talking to someone real is just the antidote he needs from whatever spiraling out he’s doing in his own head right now. Call her, talk about work, maybe even tell her he changed his mind and wants to grab dinner with them tonight after all. Ground himself. 

Steve stalks over to his desk, ready to pick up the phone and get himself together—Peggy has only ever been sympathetic and bracing for him in equal measure, a lot like his mom in that way, practical and kind. 

Instead, his eyes land on his raincoat, hung on the peg inside the door above his muddy boots. 

There’s a limp, faded white flower in the buttonhole. The wood anemone Bucky had placed there. 

Steve reaches for it with fingers that tremble slightly, and it’s solid underneath them as he draws it out. Solid and ugly too, from being plucked and sitting overnight without any water. Too real in its crumpled and bruised appearance to ignore. 

He reaches for the phone on his desk, letting his fist curl around the small dead flower. But instead of punching in a call to Peggy, he opens a tab for search bar, hastily typing in “wood anemone flower meaning.” 

Wood anemone, common meanings: The loss of a loved one. Associated with the faerie world and protection against evil and ill wishes. _Anticipation_. 

Steve lets out a long, pained breath, and lets the anemone fall to the cluttered desktop. 

He hadn’t known any of that before, he’s sure of it. He’s an environmental scientist and fairly well-versed in his botany, he knew the Latin name for it, but even in his own subconscious wouldn’t have imparted all of _that_ onto one single blossom at that parting. 

He gives up the pretense that he’s going to get any work done today. He’s got to go back. 

He has to see if the rest of yesterday was as real as this lonesome flower. 

If— _if_ —he finds himself again at the edge of a faerie ring, in the company of a dryad and in the presence of magic again, he can worry about what to do about it then. 

Maybe Bucky won’t be there. And then he’ll know it’s time to have a serious talk with himself. Or maybe he will be, and then he’ll know it’s time to approach the whole irrational situation rationally and figure out what he’s dealing with. 

One way or another, _anticipation_ seems to be an accurate word.

He doesn’t realize he’s been holding his breath—at least metaphorically—the whole way through the edge of town, across a rolling field, and into the edge of the trees until he steps between an oak and a leaning beech to find red mushrooms at his feet, and he sucks in his breath with a deep sigh. The hawthorn, at least, at the center of its ring was real.

Steve steps gingerly over the line of toadstools, and he isn’t sure if the shiver that runs through the glade is real or just the unreasonable reaction of his own skin to being back. Just a shudder of relief, maybe, that he didn’t imagine _everything_ …

“Steve!” Bucky’s voice rings out clear and pleased, and he’s beaming as he looks down at Steve through the branches from his high perch. 

Steve would be a goddamn liar if he said his heartbeat didn’t kick up a few notches at the sight of him. 

He feels a rush of confused things—both because he had more than half expected never to see Bucky again, and also because Bucky seems so obviously happy to be seeing _him_. The mix of those feelings swirls together to produce a physical reaction that he knows is a probably remarkable blush creeping up his neck and staining his face. Steve ducks his head, collecting himself, and when he looks up again Bucky is dropping from the bough above him to land lightly on his feet in front of Steve, grin still in place.

“You came back,” Bucky says, tilting his head and fixing Steve with that bright, piercing gaze. “I didn’t know if you’d find your way again.” 

“Well I—I have a GPS,” Steve says, shrugging, the casualness of the gesture belying the swooping relief in his stomach. 

Bucky’s mouth twists into something wry. “You’d be surprised how that doesn’t always make a difference.” 

Steve frowns at that, not sure what to make of it. Bucky beckons to him, turning to sit in the soft grass at the base of the hawthorn, and Steve follows automatically to sit beside him, knees drawn up. He casts a sideways look at Bucky through his eyelashes. Today he isn’t wearing a mimic of Steve’s clothing, but a simple pair of jeans and a white t-shirt, his feet bare and hair falling in loose waves around his face. 

“I slept for eight hours last night without waking up once,” Steve’s mouth says, seemingly without permission. He looks away, embarrassed, but he can feel Bucky’s curious eyes on him. “I just mean—I had to come back and at least…at least see. If any of this was real.” 

Bucky bumps his shoulder against Steve’s, startling him into looking up—surprised again at the solidity of the contact, that Bucky’s body really is composed of bone and muscle when Steve still expects it not to stand up to the scrutiny of touch but to fade like mist if he examines him too closely. Bucky is peering at him under a raised brow, amused. 

“What would make you think it wasn’t real?” He asks. “I thought we had a nice chat yesterday.” 

“Yep. Yesterday I stumbled into a faerie ring, met a dryad who told me Groucho Marx jokes, and then slept better than I have in months.” Steve bites the inside of his cheek, mouth twisting. “Can’t really blame a guy for wondering when exactly the dreaming started.” 

“I’m real Steve,” Bucky says, eyes darkening. “Real as you are.” 

“Are you?” The question pops out of his mouth unbidden. “Maybe you’re just what I want you to be.” 

Bucky’s eyes narrow a little at that, his expression melting into something unreadable. 

He leans forward, and there’s something both predatory and paralyzing in the motion that makes Steve freeze. Bucky’s hand raises in his periphery, though Steve’s eyes are locked onto Bucky’s, and he feels cool fingers brush against his jaw. Bucky’s gaze darts across Steve’s face and Steve’s heart hammers against his ribcage, but still he doesn’t move, he can’t. Bucky leans forward, his face tipping up slightly, and presses his mouth to Steve’s. 

It’s chaste, and Bucky’s mouth is as cool as his fingertips at Steve’s cheek. But it burns him just the same. Still the surprise of it is enough that he tips a little forward into it, Bucky’s bottom lip smooth against his as he kisses back…

Steve starts back with a sharp intake of breath, back of his hand going to his mouth as he stares at Bucky, wide-eyed. 

Bucky pulls back too, though less hastily, and he only looks mildly intrigued. 

“What—why did you do that?” Steve asks, words tumbling over each other. 

Bucky shrugs, still not breaking his gaze. “Just trying to figure out what it is you want me to be, if you’re so certain it’s all a dream anyway. Seemed like it might be that. Didn’t do anything for you, huh?” 

Steve shakes his head, though he wouldn’t say that. Not at all. 

“You don’t have to—that’s not what I meant. You don’t need to be—be anything.”

“As you like,” Bucky says lightly. “But I’m wondering why a person who generally doesn’t seem like a wild-eyed lunatic would rather assume he’s going crazy or sleepwalking than believe there’s things in the world he isn’t aware of.” Bucky pauses, tongue darting out to wet his lower lip, and Steve hates how powerless he is not to follow the movement. Just when he’d talked sense to himself and gotten his head around a way to be reasonable about this whole scenario, once again Bucky has him off-kilter in a completely new way. “Has magic really fallen off the map so much out there that you’d doubt all of your own senses when you stumble on some?” 

Steve’s eyebrows snap together in a defensive glower.

“Why are you so reluctant to take this all at face value?” Bucky continues, and his voice is a little softer. “Didn’t you ever believe in magic?”

The question strikes against the heavy stone in his chest where memories of his mom live, and the friction causes a spark like anger to flare up his throat. He makes a disgusted sound. 

“ _Magic_ ,” Steve grits out, like it’s a dirty word. “Sure, lots of times. Lots of times when I would’ve begged for it. But it’s no good now—the fact that it existed all that time when I would’ve—now there’s no fucking point. Being crazy wouldn’t be any less helpful.” 

The last sentence comes out practically a growl, and Steve leaps to his feet as well, suddenly feeling at odds with the idea of lounging in the spring green carpet of a faerie ring. Chatting with the Fair Folk as if he has no other concern in the world. 

Maybe he doesn’t. His great concerns are behind him, and now he’s just cleaning up in the aftermath, because he hadn’t been able to fix them. 

Steve clenches his hands into fists, stalking to the edge of the ring. The tight ball of hurt that has grown so familiar under his ribs has come to life all at once, slithering and coiling inside of him. He breathes deeply, trying to quiet it again. The seething mess doesn’t want to be quieted though. Steve kicks out viciously at a pair of russet-colored mushrooms at the edge of the ring, watching them crumple and fly apart under his foot with satisfaction. 

Then he looks at the empty space, a small gap in the circle where the rest of the ring still stands and spreads away from him, and he repents of the gesture. His eyes sting, absurdly, looking at the unfilled place. 

Bucky is suddenly in his peripheral vision, though Steve hadn’t heard him get up or draw near. He moves past Steve to kneel beside the mushroom ring, and as Steve watches he waves a hand slowly over the scattered patch of earth. Under the weight of his gaze, a small spot of red pushes at the dirt, and then two more beside it—three little mushroom caps rising as he watches to fill the vacant spot so that the ring is once again complete and unbroken. Bucky draws his hand back and stands, turning to face Steve again. 

“You’re angry.” 

“Yeah.” Steve grimaces. Had he known he was angry before right now? It crept up on him, somehow. Hadn’t factored in to his stern mental talking-to this morning when he was trying to parse what he felt about the possibility or impossibility of magic. 

“At me?” There’s no heat in the question, just curiosity. 

“I don’t know—no.” 

“Steve.” His name comes quiet and serious, like a rock tossed into a still pond, the sound of it rippling across the glade. Steve turns around. Bucky’s standing three feet back, head cocked intently, bare toes curling in the grass. “Who did you lose?” 

Steve shudders. The flame of his anger abandons him at the naked directness of the question, and his shoulders slump. He wraps his arms around to clutch at his elbows, hunching in around the feeling. 

“My mom. Two months ago.” Steve’s throat feels raw as if he’d been crying, though the tears that had sprung up over the kicked mushrooms hadn’t even made it over the rim of his eyelids to spill over, and he’s got them more or less reined back now. 

“I’m sorry,” Bucky says. And to Steve’s surprise, he looks it, too. In fact for the first time Steve notes that there are actual lines around Bucky’s mouth as it tips down into a frown, as well as fine ones crinkling his forehead. It’s an odd look on him—imperfect. It strikes Steve that maybe Bucky isn’t carved from marble or formed of mist after all. 

The last bit of fight goes out of Steve with a soft whoosh of breath. He feels very small all at once. Smaller than he ever felt when he actually _was_ small. It’s funny, he thinks, how back when he was scrawny and sick half the time he’d never felt it—there had always been a smoldering certainty about life and about himself that had kept him a head and shoulders above the crowd. It almost feels like the world waited til he had his growth spurt (just as he was heading into college) and sudden bloom of health to throw anything at him. He was a sophomore when his mom had her first brush with the cancer that ultimately did not go as into remission as they’d hoped then. 

If it’s true that his own health and strength that he now enjoys had been a trade off for all the hard, crushing things that came after, he would wish in a heartbeat to make the trade in reverse. He hadn’t enjoyed catching every respiratory infection that came his way—but being a ninety pound anemic with a bad immune system who had a mom who loved him and certainty that the world was generally _good_ hadn’t been so bad. 

Bucky tips his head back toward the tree with a question in his eyes, but a gentle one. Steve follows him, his feet feeling very heavy. They sink back into a sitting position against the trunk, and Steve lets his head fall back against the bark with a thunk, closing his eyes. 

They’re both quiet for a while, and Steve finds himself matching his own breathing to Bucky’s soft, steady rhythm of inhales and exhales. 

“I don’t know if this…helps.” Bucky says after a few minutes of silence, the words coming slow. Steve keeps his eyes closed, and Bucky continues. “But magic isn’t…usually what you would hope for it to be. If you had had it then—before you lost her—it’s not the panacea you’d want. And sometimes knowing that it’s _there_ and that you still can’t change anything is much worse. Magic isn’t _good_ , it isn’t evil either. It just is. Like life or death or the sunrise. Or like… _change_ I suppose, is what it’s closest to being. Sometimes change works in brilliant ways and sometimes terrible ones, same as magic. But the one thing I _can_ say about it is that it has a cost and that cost isn’t ever what you expect, but you find you have to pay it even if you didn’t know what you were getting into. And you usually find you didn’t know what you were buying either.” 

There’s a strange weightiness to the words, heavier than something said just to appease the listener. Steve cracks his eyes open and glances sideways at Bucky. There are lines cutting across his face again, concern and something darker pulling at his forehead and mouth. 

“Who did you lose?” Steve parrots back Bucky’s earlier question on a hunch. 

Bucky snorts softly, looking down and plucking at the grass with long fingers. “Myself, I think. I don’t remember the rest.” 

“Who were you before?” Steve asks, almost at a whisper. 

Bucky shakes his head, looking rueful. “It doesn’t matter. Who I was before was the price of what I am now. And magic is like change that way too—once it’s done you can’t go back.” 

Steve notes the specific choice of words in _what I am now_ rather than _who I am now_ , but he doesn’t begin to know how to ask about it. So he stays quiet. 

“Would you…want to tell me about her?” Bucky asks. 

Steve lets a long breath out through his nose and examines the question. And he finds, to his surprise, that he does. The corner of his mouth quirks into almost a smile. 

“She was the one of the two of us who believe in…all this,” he waves his hand vaguely around the clearing. “She grew up in Ireland and—”

“Where?” 

“County Kerry. Pretty small town up in the middle of nowhere, lots of old school traditions. Most of them didn’t make sense to me because I was only a baby when she left so I grew up a New York City kid through and through. But it was sweet—” he cuts his eyes at Bucky, “or I guess I always thought it was sweet. That she kept it up. Now I’m rethinking a little bit.” 

Bucky grins, finally letting his worry lines fade. “What was she like?” 

Steve laughs, and finds that it isn’t as painful as he’d have feared. Instead of the flare of grief he’d expect, he feels a swelling bubble of affection as he thinks about Sarah. 

“She’s—was—the best mom ever. Like, I thought that when I was a kid, but I thought it even more when I grew up. She was crazy smart. A nurse, and she had all the doctors on her wing under her thumb. No nonsense, but also goofy if you got her in the right mood. She was always singing. Bullshit meter like you wouldn’t believe, but she told the best fucking stories. I must’ve had a whole shelf of books by the time I was in kindergarten but I don’t remember reading a single one til I went to school and I had to because I always preferred the ones she made up.” 

“She sounds really special.” 

Steve nods, smile waning a little. “She was. She was really strong too, though I didn’t really appreciate that until later. But it was just her and me and I never felt like—like there was anything missing. Now I know that she must’ve been so tired making it that way when I was little, because I was sick like all the time and she managed to be there for all of that—”

“Sick?” Bucky asks. 

Steve nods. “Yeah I was really honestly pretty weak as a kid, small too—just couldn’t seem to catch up to everybody and I always caught whatever bug was going around…” 

“But not anymore?” Bucky’s tone is a little sharper than warranted, and it makes Steve look over at him. There’s something intent on his face that fades as soon as Steve looks. But it makes Steve answer a bit slower for not knowing why he’s so interested. 

“No I…I grew out of it when I hit about eighteen. Immune system just finally sort of kicked in and I had a growth spurt.” He eyes Bucky’s now innocent expression. “Why?” 

Bucky shakes his head. “Just…wondering. You were born in Ireland then?” 

“Yeah. But we moved over when I was like, two months old so I don’t remember it or anything.” 

“Hmm.” Is all Bucky says. 

“What about you?” Steve asks. Bucky raises his eyebrows. 

“What about me?” 

“What you lost. Do you want to tell me about it?” Steve wonders if he’s crossing a line. But he never really did learn to be coy, and besides, Bucky has been fairly unflinching in his own inquiries to this point. 

Bucky huffs a dry laugh, looking away and letting his own head roll back agains the tree trunk. 

“I wish I knew where to begin if I wanted to try.” A crease forms between his eyebrows as he peers off into the middle ground, and Steve notices again that his eyes have shifted to the stormy grey of rain on the sea. “He laughed more than I do now, I think.” Bucky’s frown deepens for a moment, and Steve almost asks what it is he’s thinking so hard about. But then his face clears and he shakes his head. “Like I said, doesn’t matter now. I am what I am.” 

“I suppose,” Steve says. His mom’s face flashes up in front of him, before she’d gotten sick, whole and happy and laughing over her well-scrubbed kitchen table. “But isn’t change only change because we remember what things used to be? To accept your metaphor.”

“Touche,” Bucky says with a laugh. But Steve can tell that the door to that conversation has closed, and Bucky isn’t going to give him any more than that no matter how cleverly he counters. 

As if to confirm his suspicion, Bucky springs nimbly to his feet, and turns to Steve with a mischievous look on his face. His eyes are sparkling, and it hits Steve how very not human he looks. Like a fae thing. Steve hadn’t noticed that Bucky had ever _stopped_ looking otherworldly, since his beauty didn’t lessen at all—but it seems now that there must have been a change over the course of their short acquaintanceship, because he feels the difference now. 

Bucky stares back at Steve for a long moment, almost knowingly. When he reaches out his hand to offer it to help Steve stand, he also allows the force of his sly grin to abate into something a little more comfortable. 

“Have you ever seen a blackbird hatching, Steve?” He asks, darting a look up through the branches of the tree. 

“No, I don’t think I have.” 

Bucky gives his hand a squeeze. Steve realizes belatedly that he should have let go of it already, and he drops it like a hot coal. Bucky smiles at him, impassive, and looks upward again. 

It’s all the warning he gets before Bucky is launching himself upwards, and though Steve tries harder this time to see how, he still can’t quite track the motion that brings him to be sitting easily on the branch. 

“Well, with any luck you’re going to see one today. Come on, give me your hand.” 

Steve doesn’t have it in himself to do anything but obey. 

***


	4. Four

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some friends appear! a good Bird Boy and some staunch ladies for our sad Steeb.

Steve spends the rest of the day in the hawthorn glade with Bucky.

They don't talk again about Sarah or about magic. But they do sit quietly among the whispering branches and listen to the tiny but dedicated sound of three blackbird chicks chipping away at their speckled blue shells. Steve had worried a little out of professionalism about scaring their mother off by their presence. But maybe thanks to Bucky and his dominion over the inhabitants of the faerie ring, she remains undisturbed and merely regards them with a cocked head now and again as she watches over her hatching. 

Then they sit together less quietly, as three ugly, noisy chicks begin their first squalling cries for food and their mother makes little trips about the glade to provide it for them. 

"Sing a song of six pence, pocket full of rye, four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie," Bucky hums under his breath, "when the pie was opened the birds began to sing, wasn't that a dainty dish to set before a king?' 

Steve chuckles, shaking his head and resituating his seat on the branch. "That's a little dark, don't you think?" 

"Faerie tales and nursery rhymes are always dark, Steve. None of them are really meant for children." 

Sometime in the afternoon when his stomach begins to rumble, Steve digs a couple of protein bars out of his jacket pockets and divides them up with Bucky. Bucky, for his part, takes one bite and refuses to eat any more. 

" _Jesus_ I'm glad food is optional in my line of existence, that's godawful," he says with a grimace, tossing the bar back to Steve. 

Steve doesn't disagree, but as food is _not_ optional for him he eats both bars anyway and is glad for them. They mean he doesn't have to leave yet for real life in order to go find sustenance. 

Later on they climb down from the tree and lie in the grass, looking up at the fragile wisps of clouds in the bit of sky they can see through the branches. Steve asks Bucky if he really can recite any Yeats, and Bucky accepts it as the challenge it is with a (to Steve's ear) flawless rendition of _The Stolen Child_. Steve doesn't have time to express how impressed he is before Bucky flows straight into an even more remarkable one-man performance of _Who's on First_. Steve's eyes are streaming with laughter by midway into it, and he bats at Bucky's arm for mercy, but Bucky doesn't break his stride at all til it's done. 

When the golden light begins to go purple, Bucky rises to his feet and Steve follows suit. 

"Time for you to get back," Bucky says. Steve nods in agreement, though in all likelihood he’d probably stay even into the darkness if Bucky didn't say anything. 

"Until we meet again, Steve Rogers." Bucky says at the edge of the clearing, once again falling back onto the solemn formality with which he'd said goodbye the night before. 

"Bucky I'll—I’m going to come back." Steve says, hesitant. 

This time Bucky's face is a little less sad and a little more hopeful when he says "Good. I'd like that."  
Steve almost reaches out—to squeeze his shoulder, maybe—but ultimately resists, shoving his traitorous hands instead into his pockets as he turns and slips away into the twilit forest.

He resolutely doesn't think about the kiss that night.

But the next day, after another long and gloriously unbroken night of sleep, which he now thinks must be some form of magic in itself, the thought of it hits him with a full force that he's powerless to keep at bay. 

_I’m just trying to figure out what you want me to be_. What the _fuck_ did that mean? 

Well for one thing, it meant that what Steve had thought of as merely his passive acknowledgement of Bucky’s objectively overwhelming beauty had _not_ gone unnoticed. 

Which is funny considering he hadn’t really allowed himself to dwell on it. It wasn’t like meeting someone you found attractive in the ordinary way, was it? Recognizing the unearthly allure of him was more in line with recognizing the unbelievable reality that Bucky was a fae thing. If Steve had thought specifically about it at all, he would have assumed that part of being the inhabitant of a magic realm must naturally come with that dazzling grace. Maybe Bucky hadn’t particularly noticed Steve noticing, but assumed that any human in the presence of one of the Fair Folk must automatically find themselves half in awe and half in love with them from the first sight. Isn’t that enchantment part of the ancient lore regardless? 

Still, now that he _is_ considering it…he’s not certain if he can put his entire assessment of Bucky’s physical appeal down to the glamor around him. 

If he had met Bucky in an ordinary way, say in the cereal aisle of the grocery store, or at a happy hour at a bar which is something Steve had occasionally done in the Before, he doesn’t think he would have been any less enthralled for the lack of magic in it. Once upon a time, when Steve had had space in his life for things like dating and attraction, Bucky would have been his type. Just as Peggy had been, in the early days before they both determined friendship was a much better match for them. He’s always felt the pull of a bright eyed brunette who could make him laugh. 

But of course he _didn’t_ meet Bucky in the grocery store. So it’s irrelevant. And the idea of Bucky being detached enough from it all not to care if that is what Steve might want from him makes him uncomfortable in a vague, deep-seated way. As much as he’d feared yesterday morning that Bucky was a product of his own lonely mind, he doesn’t think it any more. And if Bucky really is an independent being with thoughts and a will of his own, Steve doesn’t want him to shift any bit of that to fit what he thinks Steve might want from him. 

Steve finds rather that what he wants is to know more about who _Bucky_ wants to be. Or is, outside of the perceptions of whatever hapless human may have wandered into his world. He wonders if any of the rest of what he’s seen of him was just Bucky putting on an act he thought would appeal to Steve. He doesn’t like the idea. 

Well. He hopes he made his feelings about that clear, at least. Though it’s hard to recall exactly what he’d said when his brain had been scrambling for purchase in the wake of Bucky’s unexpectedly soft and searing mouth on his. 

He resolves to do better the next time he sees him, to be clear that he doesn’t want Bucky to be anything he isn’t. 

_Next time_ , a sensible corner of his mind scoffs. Two days spent accomplishing nothing else but being near Bucky and he’s already thinking ahead to next time. 

On the bedside table, his cellphone starts to buzz, vibrating itself toward the edge and startling Steve from his thoughts. 

_Sam Wilson_ flashes over the screen, along with the photo that never fails to make Steve laugh. It’s from the night of Sam’s hooding ceremony when he’d finished his PhD—he’s grinning under sunglasses that are upside down on his face, a beer in one hand and flipping the camera (held by Steve) off with the other, framing the hideous orange shirt bearing the words “Talk Birdy to Me.” 

“Sam? Hi!” Steve answers. 

“Rogers are you—did I wake you up? Just checking, you’re on England time, not Hawaii right? As in it’s almost nine a.m. there?” Sam practically crows on the other end of the line. 

Steve’s mouth curls into a smile, “ _No_ Sam you didn’t wake me up.” 

“Mmm,” Sam says dubiously, “you’re still in bed though aren’t you? _Aren’t_ you? Don’t lie to me Steve I can tell.” 

“Maybe,” Steve admits with a small laugh. “Fuck off.” 

“Man I’m not complaining I’m just impressed. With myself, obviously. Never been the early bird in this relationship before.” Sam’s laughing too, but then he continues, more seriously. “I’m just glad you’re sleeping better. This a good thing?” 

“I—” Steve hesitates. He still isn’t sure of the answer to that himself. “Yeah—yeah I think it is. New thing, at least. Anyway why _are_ you up this early?”

Sam lets out an eloquent snort. “Dude just because you’re not here doesn’t mean I can’t still get my run on. Kinda knew how to jog in a circle before I met you you know.” 

Steve laughs. “True, guess I just kicked your ass enough times I figured it might’ve scrambled your brains too bad to remember how without me.”

“Yeah I bet you’d like to see it that way. Joke’s on you though—I understand the importance of promising yourself something really awful and covered in chocolate afterwards for motivation. I’ll shoot you a picture of my Nutella waffles later. None of your spinach omelet nonsense today.” 

Steve huffs, and Sam chuckles too before subsiding into a (mostly) comfortable silence. Steve lets the smile fade as he waits. He knows Sam didn’t actually call to rib him about their running routine. 

“How’s England?” Sam asks after a few moments. “How are you?” 

Steve sighs. Sam always asks—it’s one of the things that makes him a good friend. Unfortunately lately Steve almost never knows how to answer. Though Sam doesn’t seem to mind—that’s the other thing that makes him a good friend. 

“It’s…slower. We’re out in the countryside basically, you know. Quiet.” 

“Good quiet?” 

“I…think so.” Steve shifts, suddenly restless. “I don’t know. Maybe. You’d think it’d make it easier to get the job done when there’s nothing else _to_ do but…” 

“But not so much? That’s not that crazy. You’ve still got a lot on your plate, even if it’s not all on your schedule.” 

Steve thinks about Bucky, and about the last two days which have felt like so much longer, so full and—and spacious, somehow, even contained in the little circle of the hawthorn. 

“Yeah,” he says, “yeah I guess you’re right. Lots to think about.” 

Sam hums. “You know Peggy gets that right? She didn’t hire you to be Mr. Efficiency. If it takes you a little time to get into it I mean—”

“I know,” Steve cuts him off, frustrated. “You think I don’t know this was a pity hire? You guys conspiring to get me out of Brooklyn—”

Sam’s voice flares back with its own frustration, “Man shut—you _know_ that’s not what I meant. You can feel sorry for yourself—in fact I think we’d both be thrilled if you let yourself just _be sad_. But don’t give me this pity crap, that’s not how friendship works. You were a mess in Brooklyn and giving you a reason to get out of here where you can also use your skills and take a little time to get back on your feet isn’t some—”

“Sam,” Steve breaks in, shutting his eyes tight. “I’m sorry. That was a shitty thing to say.”

Sam sighs heavily on the other end of the call. “Yeah. Okay. I’m just saying this is hard for you and it’s supposed to be hard, losing your mom. Let us do the very minimal amount that we can to help out at least.” 

“Yeah,” Steve says softly. “I don’t know what…what I would’ve done without you guys. That last month. You know that right?” 

Sam’s silent for a moment, and it occurs to Steve that maybe Sam _doesn’t_ know that. Or at least doesn’t know that Steve knows it. He hasn’t been able to thank them, either of them, properly. It’s not that he minds admitting it, how much he had leaned on Sam especially when things took their final turn with his mom’s diagnosis but—he just doesn’t like thinking of that time at all. Not closely. And definitely not talking about it. Still, Sam deserves to hear it. Peggy too, and he makes a mental note to tell her. 

“I love you buddy,” Sam says finally. “I wish we could do something to make it actually better.” 

“I know.” And he does. He’s not sure what he did to deserve people like Sam and Peggy in his life, but _god_ he knows he’s lucky for it. “But how are you? How are the birds?” 

Sam is an ornithologist, working on research about urban avifauna in New York City for Cornell, and the proud owner of at least a dozen bird pun t-shirts courtesy of a group of friends who finds his passion for winged creatures a great source of gift-related comedy. 

He’s deflecting answering Sam’s question about himself, and Sam allows it for the moment. 

“Birds are good. Got a new grad student assistant who’s completely overhauled my whole spreadsheet system in like the last three days. Can’t believe I have the gall to pretend I’m teaching her anything but I’ll take it. Got a bunch of hatchings we’re trying to track around Prospect Park probably happening this week.” 

The image of little blue eggs tipping themselves over in a blackbird nest (and Bucky’s breath catching beside him as a small beak breaks through) flashes before Steve. His stomach twists itself in a knot as one moment to the next he realizes how much he wishes he could tell Sam about it—and then immediately how he definitely can’t. 

“That’s—that sounds really exciting,” he says, and his voice comes out a little hoarse. 

“Mm,” Sam says, thoughtfully. “Guess spring really must be something over there huh? Green as you’d hoped?” 

“Yeah it’s…it’s more than I expected.” 

Steve cringes a little at his inability to hide anything, ever. He can hear in Sam’s silence that Sam is fully aware that there’s something Steve isn’t saying because Sam can _always_ tell. He could tell when Steve was bullshitting him as a freshman in the dorms and he’s only honed the skill in the ten years of friendship since. And Steve hates that he’s likely going to get away with it because Sam probably assumes it’s to do with his mom and Sam has been so terribly good a friend about not pressing him too hard right now. 

He’s right. When Sam responds, his voice is bright and encouraging. 

“That sounds great man. I can’t wait to hear more about it sometime. Hey send me some pics if you want? I miss your dumb tree facts.” 

“Yeah—yeah I’ll do that.” 

He thinks about the photos of the flowering hawthorn he’d shot before Bucky had dropped down from the branches and knocked his world off kilter. But he knows he won’t send Sam those. He’ll send him some boring snaps of the—admittedly beautiful but not life-changing—English oaks instead and feel bad about keeping a secret. 

“Call me next week sometime, I’m in the field so I can chat. Whenever.” 

“Thanks Sam,” Steve says, still feeling all twisty inside. “Have a good run.” 

Sam hangs up, and Steve looks down at the blank screen of his phone for a long minute. 

 

After the call with Sam, Steve feels the guilty pull of his desk, where the notes for his report and inspection equipment have sat untouched for the past two days. 

He’s had reality on hiatus, he knows. And it can’t stay that way. He does have to make _some_ effort at being a person in the world who’s still trying to keep his head above water. Sam’s unspoken worry on that call had been a good reminder of what he’s trying to do here, which is regain _some_ semblance of normalcy. Instead he’s gone tearing off in the exact opposite direction. 

Yet he feels just as guilty when he thinks about Bucky’s regretful solemnity at their parting, and what he now thinks was excited relief when he’d greeted Steve this morning. Steve hadn’t believed he’d ever see Bucky again, and it seems Bucky must have believed the same. And if he’d thought that seeing him yesterday and confirming that Bucky wasn’t a hallucination would allow him to move on from it, he was woefully wrong. Spending the day with him had left him with only more questions, a low burning desire to know _more_ of him, and more again. 

Steve groans and hauls himself to his little kitchen to get his coffee started. He’s sure now that Bucky is as real as himself. But that means that Bucky is also only as real as the rest of his life—the inspection report, Peggy and the development firm, Sam and his caring concern. He’ll have to try to balance it, somehow. Much as he wants to throw it all to the wind and…the train of thought derails there. If he abandoned everything else it still wouldn’t—there’s no real escape from any of it to be had. 

So he makes a full pot of coffee, slams down a piece of toast, and buries himself at his desk for the day. 

Sure, he’s pretty certain it’s not what Sam had in mind, but it’s good—probably. Good to focus on a task he knows how to do, work that’s been a part of his life for many years and that, if it doesn’t currently light a fire in him, he can at least remember finding joy in before things went sideways. Maybe if he relearns the motions of it, the feeling good will follow. 

And anyway barring all of that, he’s not going to let Peggy down. Good friends are hard to come by—possibly even rarer than magic. Steve’s not going to toss that aside.

Eventually he does lose himself in the work. Going through the photos he’d taken earlier in the week—feeling like it’s been a hundred years, but still—and cataloguing the flora present against his database. There are a couple of specimens that he’s unsure about, and he spends some satisfying hours tracking them down too, getting himself more familiar with what grows around here, all tumbled together in the lush tangle of the old growth forest. It’s soothing research, and he likes it.

He’s so deep in it, actually, that it's once again his phone buzzing on the desk that pulls him out. It’s such a rare occurrence anymore that he frowns at it, confused for a moment when he’s already had one phone call today. 

It’s just a text this time, from Peggy, reminding him about their Friday night dinner plans at the pub. Steve shakes his head, but glancing at his watch he also has to admit he probably would’ve missed it without the reminder. It’s a lot later than he’d realized, and he’s _starving_. So he restrains himself from texting back anything too snarky, and instead hustles himself quickly through a shower and into presentable clothing. 

The creaky wooden stairs of his flat are slick and the air fresh with recent rain as Steve locks the door behind himself and steps out into a chilly evening. A good amount of rain too, by the looks of the muddy garden beds below, though he hadn’t really taken note of it with his head bent over his work. 

What does Bucky do in the rain? he wonders. Does Bucky live all the time in the hawthorn glade, simply taking shelter like a bird or any other inhabitant of the woodland? Or does he go— _elsewhere_ sometimes, when Steve isn’t around? 

The pub is only a few blocks away from his flat, near to Peggy’s headquarters so it’s easy for her to dash down and meet him and Angie now that she’s working longer hours these days. He also passes by the staging grounds where the first part of construction is already underway. It’s a large project, the expansion the town has undertaken. Here on the edge of town it’s a series of new and better facilities that will eventually house the county offices, and soon, once Steve’s portion is done and ground has been broken, a badly needed second high school (or secondary school, rather, he reminds himself) and community center. 

The administrative offices, recently framed, are starting already to look as they will when they’re completed and Steve takes a moment as he walks by to admire Peggy’s design. She’d taken pains for them to look as if they belong among the much older, grown in structures around it. He can already see the shape of the peaked roofs and the facade that will eventually be bricked in. 

He’s about to pass by them entirely, eyes turning toward the end of the cobblestone street to seek out the hanging coat of arms that marks the pub entrance, when something stops him in his tracks. 

There’s a few walls up in the furthest building, mostly covered in tarp now to protect the unfinished materials from the rain. But at one end the tarp has been torn back, the fresh white of the new drywall gleaming in the glow of a streetlight. 

And written on it in shaky, painted letters is a message that sends a chill up Steve’s spine. 

_Who spilt the blood in Brightneau Wood?_

Steve unconsciously tugs his jacket tighter around the collar. The letters are red, he can see now, looking themselves like blood—though blood never dries so bright—and dripped in places as if from haste. 

He’s not sure what it means, but he doesn’t suppose he needs to to understand what feeling it’s supposed to inspire. And to know that the placement of the graffiti on one of the buildings attached to the same project that will soon be clearing a section of Brightneau isn’t accidental. 

Steve tears his gaze away and walks much more quickly the final two blocks to the pub. 

It’s an adjustment stepping into the warm, damp heat of the packed building, with its low ceiling and odd assortment of tables crowded about. Steve sheds his coat inside the door to hang on the rack, but he feels a chill lingering with him despite the many bodies packed into the small space. 

He spots Peggy and Angie at once, tucked into the little corner table they always somehow manage to claim despite the other customers jostling for space during dinner hour. Steve’s always put it down to the unnatural charm and rapport Angie seems to exercise over any waiter or bartender who crosses her path. 

Steve ducks his head and weaves between bodies as best he can without bumping anyone. Now that he’s closer he can see that Peggy’s face is a little paler than usual, and she’s clutching a rather large glass of wine in both hands. 

He drops heavily into the open chair, and Peggy and Angie both look up—startled first, and then relieved. Angie’s usually jovial face is uncharacteristically grim, and she has a hand on the back of Peggy’s neck. Steve notices as she gives a last reassuring squeeze before letting go so they can both turn better to face him. 

“Did you see it?” Peggy asks, simply. The shiver in Steve’s spine runs up it again—it was one thing to see it by himself in the dark street, and another to hear Peggy’s normally confident voice come out shaken. 

“Yeah…what the fuck?” He asks. 

Angie barks a humorless laugh. “You said it, Brooklyn.” 

Peggy shakes her head. “I don’t know. It showed up sometime after the crew quit for the day—I’d swear I was only in my office for another half hour before I came down here, I don’t know how someone...” She trails off and takes a gulp of her wine. 

“Do you know what it—what it means?” Steve asks. 

“No bloody idea.” Peggy says. “If it’s someone’s idea of a prank it’s rather distasteful.” Then more quietly, “But I can’t believe that it is, not with…” Her red lips thin for a moment. “Not with everything else going wrong lately. I had another break-in last night, some tools missing and a whole wall of wiring ripped out.” 

Steve swallows dryly. “You think…you think that bad luck isn’t so much luck after all?” 

“I don’t know, Steve. Some of it is so—I don’t know how anybody could’ve made things rot before they ought to, or flood where it hasn’t before but—but sabotage is certainly on my mind.” 

“Jesus,” Steve says. He can’t disagree with her assessment of the strange forces of nature, but maybe someone not keen on the project found a way to lend them a hand. “You had complaints or anything? People in town who aren’t—?”

Peggy shakes her head again. “No nothing like that! Not even in the usual way of these things, it was the smoothest town hall I’ve ever been to when they proposed it. The old offices are crumbling and parents have been campaigning for the new school for years. I just don’t know.” 

“You’re still making progress honey,” Angie says staunchly, “probably just some teenage asshole trying to freak everybody out since they’ve got nothing better to do.” Her mouth quirks up. “And terrible shitty class sizes at the old school so their teachers aren’t keeping them in line, right?” 

Peggy laughs weakly and reaches out to squeeze Angie’s hand. “You’re probably right. Unfortunately if that’s what they were after it’s rather worked tonight.” 

Angie gives a decisive nod. “Right. What we all need is a stiff drink and some good old-fashioned meat and potatoes to get our feet back on the ground. I’m going to go bug Frank, so _you_ —” she nods at Peggy, “finish up that wine and get ready for a whiskey, and _you_ —” she fixes her gaze on Steve and pushes her own glass of wine at him, “take care of this while I’m up.” 

Steve accepts the wine meekly as Angie bustles away from the table toward the crowded bar, somehow cutting in at just the moment someone turns away so that she walks right up to the polished wood to lean over and get the attention of one of the harried bartenders. Steve watches gratefully, and when he looks back he sees the same kind of admiring look on Peggy’s face, but with an added tenderness that makes him smile into Angie’s wine. 

“She’s a force of nature, huh?” Steve says, drawing Peggy’s attention back to the table. 

Peggy grins and lifts her wine glass, and Steve clinks his own agains hers in a silent toast. 

She sighs heavily, setting the wine down, and shakes herself, visibly trying to put her nerves aside. Steve focuses on the pleasant warmth of the wine, and lets the anxious knot in his own stomach unfurl a little as well. 

“Well.” Peggy says, sounding more firm and like herself. “She’s right, it’s moving forward despite all that. And then we can watch the ribbon cutting and put it behind us. Onward and upward.” 

“Sorry it’s been such a rough go, Peg.” 

Peggy shakes her brown curls over her shoulder with a shrug. “Yes well, I’m happy it gave me the chance to get someone of such a high caliber onto my payroll at last,” her mouth softens into a smile. “How is it going, the past few days since we chatted? Sorry I haven’t been able to check in more.” 

Steve gives a silent huff of laughter at that. Peggy has “checked in” with him more than any other architect or developer he’s ever worked for before, but he appreciates the sentiment. But the knot in his stomach retwists itself as he realizes he doesn’t have a good answer to her question. 

He ducks his head, rubbing at the back of his neck. “Um…to be honest I’ve been a bit…distracted. I’m sorry Pegs.” 

“Steve,” Peggy says softly, reaching out for his hand across the table. “Don’t be sorry. It’s alright. Nothing else is on schedule anyway, you have plenty of time to—to take your time. If you need it.” 

Steve nods, eyes still on the tabletop instead of her, and he bites the inside of his cheek. 

“When we…lost Michael,” Peggy says, slowly, and Steve’s heart wrenches at how careful she’s being with him, even in the mention of her brother and her own loss, “it took a long time before…it took a long time.” Steve does look up now, and he finds Peggy’s gaze is distant, though her hand is still firm on his. She returns it to him with a small shake of her head and a wry twist to her mouth. “You know nothing will be the same again. That’s the first thing that registers really. Or it was for me. But figuring out how to go on with the difference wasn’t so simple, or so fast. You’re allowed to be distracted, Steve.” 

Steve takes in a deep, shuddering breath. “What if—what if my distractions aren’t that—that noble?” 

Peggy searches his face, dark eyes keen, and Steve holds his breath wondering what she sees there. She squeezes his hand one more time and lets go, sinking back in her chair. “Why then I still forgive you darling, and I still grant you whatever time you need to sort them.” 

“Thanks Peggy. For all of it.” 

Peggy just smiles back at him, until they’re interrupted by Angie returning with a tray of whiskey and shepard’s pie Steve has no idea how she came to be carrying by herself. But he grins up at her, and she looks between Peggy and Steve surprised but pleased. 

And despite the dark cloud which had initially hovered over the evening, and maybe is still waiting for them after they finish dinner, Steve throws himself into the effort of keeping everybody’s mind off of it, thinking that it’s small enough in return for all they’ve done for him. 

***


	5. Five

Spring is a painful season, sharp and immediate.

It’s always been that way for Steve, a restless season that he feels like growing pains. But he’s never had as much reason to feel any spring as keenly as he does this one. 

People think of winter as the death of the year. And it is, with its bare branches and everything gone to ground. It’s a purposeful season for all its bluster, the way autumn slowly pulls up a blanket of grey weather and looming storms until one day you look around and everything is lying in shroud. 

But spring— _spring_ is rarely gentle. It’s violent and erupting, green life bursting open and asserting itself amongst the quiet detritus of the previous year. It’s a fact of nature that new things grow best and richest where there is a heavy layer of the things that came before. 

Some people don’t see it. It’s easy to forget that it’s decay that feeds the insistent, grasping roots of something new. When the something new is bright, and flowering and fragrant, Steve supposes it’s easier to forget what’s underneath. 

But he can’t, not this year. 

Steve feels the inexorable clutch of the seedlings of a new kind of life piercing his heart and his bones and dragging him forward even as he sees spring taking hold all around him. But he’s not ready for it yet. His heart is still a dormant bulb, buried under the winter of the past several months. He’d loved his old life. New isn’t always preferable, however bright the colors. 

But things _will_ be new, and time will move forward. His brain, despite his wishes, continues to write new memories that solidify his residence now in the After, even if he’s traveling into it with his grief clutched tight like a suitcase in both hands. 

These are the thoughts battering against the shores of Steve’s senses as he drags himself through the next two days of work. 

It’s technically the weekend, but since he essentially took two days off midweek to accomplish nothing, Steve doesn’t fuss too much over it. The construction site is quiet though when he passes by it on his way out into the field Saturday morning, curiosity pulling him like a lure. The graffiti has been cleaned away, though the drywall couldn’t be returned quite to its pristine condition. There’s still a faintly smudged pink cloud where the red letters had been, lingering ominously. 

The rain of the previous week has vanished entirely, the entire countryside hurling itself with headlong enthusiasm into spring now. The sky is an almost overwhelming shade of blue, and a restless little breeze picks up leaves and flowers and tosses them across Steve’s path with abandon. 

He tries to keep his head down over his notebook and equipment and take everything in with professional detachment, even if it’s a losing battle. But the clear skies and relentless green gets under his skin, making him feel as restless as the breeze tugging at his hair, and his handwriting grows more frantic and messy with every step. 

He doesn’t know what he wants anymore. Or perhaps, rather, he knows many impossible things he wants and he’s tired of thinking about them and feeling that impossibility at every turn. 

And he’s tired too of his friends’ kindness and kid gloves. The understanding _you’ve got a lot on your plate_ from Sam, the _take your time_ from Peggy. If they were less sympathetic, if they just once told him move on instead, would he be able to do it then? Part of him wants it. Part of him has fully rebelled in spirit against all the _space_ they’ve given him. So, against all their good wishes and intentions, he spends two days aggressively ignoring every bad feeling clawing at his throat and tries a little bit of bottling it up instead. It’s worth a shot. 

And into the bottle, along with his mom, goes Bucky. Because isn’t Bucky also just another impossible want? 

Steve bows his head over his GPS and his soil samples and starts at the far edge of the project site, staying well away from the hawthorn clearing and the pull it has over him, the same way he stays well away from thoughts of home. 

For a little while, it works. 

It works for a day, and then two. He may dip into his sleeping pills for the two nights that accompany them, just to make sure he falls asleep without too much room to break his resolution when his head hits the pillow. He may walk around the edges of Brightneau Wood with an expression like thunderclouds. But who’s there to see? No one. He can’t even bring himself to react with appropriate horror when Peggy informs him that the graffiti is reapplied, both nights, and repeated in several new locations. But he _does_ succeed in compiling fifteen pages of his report. 

Then Monday dawns and the weather hasn’t relented in its painful cheeriness, and he feels the bottle he’d put everything away in beginning to crack. And so Steve knows his experiment is going to fail—there isn’t a bottle big enough to hold it all back. 

So when his feet find themselves roaming a familiar corner of tangled fern and moss and vines, he only pauses, sighing. And then decides not to resist. 

He can at least tell Bucky why he hasn’t been around—that he has a real life with real obligations that he has to attend to and he can’t…can’t spend all his time in the peaceful arms of the faerie ring. He just can’t. 

But still he feels the moment his boots cross the threshold of the mushroom ring with something like a sigh of relief. 

The little glade looks almost as if it’s had its own little patch of snowfall—but it’s just the hawthorn flowers falling from the branches all around it. As Steve stands at the edge of it a gust of wind puffs through, scattering another lacy swirl of them at his feet. 

There is no greeting this time from Bucky, as he enters the circle. Steve steps forward toward the tree, a new worry quickly blossoming to push out all of the old ones, eyes darting between the branches. 

“Bucky?” Steve says into the stillness, palms braced against the rough bark of the trunk. “ _Bucky?_ ” He’s ashamed of how his voice quakes a little as he calls out the second time. 

“I’m here, Steve.” 

Steve whirls, finding Bucky standing near to the edge of the ring where Steve walked in. He certainly wasn’t there before, which should alarm him and yet—it grounds him, somehow. The further proof that Bucky is precisely what he claims to be, and that that something is impossible…but not in the way Steve keeps trying to tell himself. 

“ _Oh_ ,” Steve says, “you’re here.” 

Bucky’s mouth curls at one corner. “Where else would I be?” 

“I don’t know,” Steve says truthfully. 

Bucky folds his arms across his chest, looking unimpressed. Today he’s wearing a dark green sweater over his jeans, though his feet are still bare. His eyes are nearly colorless at the moment, only a hint of sharp blue in them as he stares back at Steve. 

“Feels like surprise oughtta be my line,” he says. 

“I—I’ve had to work. Sorry.” 

Bucky shrugs one shoulder, arms still crossed. “Knew it wasn’t like there was no reason.” 

It’s not quite a reply that means “it’s fine,” and Steve can tell. His temper flares. 

“I blew everything off for the two days I spent here last week, it caught up to me. I have—I have a real life too.” 

“Believe me, Steve, I’m well aware.” Bucky’s tone remains unchanged, his eyes still unblinkingly on Steve’s face. 

Steve looks away with a frustrated huff, and runs a hand through his hair. 

“I’d rather have been here,” he says finally, not looking at Bucky but instead directing it at the slender trunk of a birch tree.

“Would you?” Bucky’s voice does shift now, the ice in it melting, just a fraction. 

Steve nods, still looking at the birch. 

“Well. Then I’m glad you came back. Even for a little.” 

Steve bites the inside of his cheek and looks back up at Bucky. “You kicking me out, dryad?”

Bucky’s smirk relents into a real smile, and he tips his head. “No. But I assume real life hasn’t stopped calling just because you couldn’t keep away.” 

Steve ducks his head at both truths contained in that statement—real life is still calling, yet he _couldn’t_ stay away. He’d really really tried. 

“True,” he says. 

“So tell me, what’s so compelling in your life out there that you have to attend to it, but so unappealing that you’d rather escape it?” He releases his arms with a restless motion, turning his head to narrow his eyes in the direction of the town. “Some job in your ugly concrete and glass town?” 

“I—sort of,” Steve says, shaking his head. “I mean I work outdoors mostly, I _am_ supposed to be in the woods I just—shouldn’t exactly be spending all my time in one spot. Usually don’t mind roving around but…guess that’s the magic. Hard to walk away from.” 

Bucky flicks him an inscrutable look. “Do you know the rules about faerie rings, Steve?” His voice is lilting and a little dangerous, and it makes the hairs on the back of Steve’s neck stand up. 

“No.” 

Bucky shifts slightly on the balls of his feet, though he doesn’t actually step any closer to Steve. 

“A human who wanders into a faerie ring is at the mercy of the fae. You get to leave when we say you do—there’s a reason I told you you were lucky it was just me you found in here.” His eyes flicker up and down Steve’s face before locking gazes with him again, and Steve notes that his have once again gone grey. “If I only wanted to keep you, I could have kept you prisoner.” 

Steve swallows. “Why didn’t you?” 

Bucky smiles, wryly, and releases Steve’s eyes. “I don’t want a prisoner. Too much work.” 

“Oh. Well…thank you, then. I guess.” He’s not actually sure if he’s grateful. 

Or if he might’ve liked Bucky to try. 

Bucky laughs, the wryness gone, and the sound is pleasant and unaffected as his shoulders relax into it, and Steve feels the tension in his own frame that he didn’t know what there evaporating as well. 

“Come on, Steve,” Bucky says brightly, turning and walking through the tall grass toward the edge of the clearing. 

Steve tips forward, following him even as he asks, “Come where?” 

Bucky looks over his shoulder, smirking, “You said you have things to do in the woods today that can’t be done here. Let’s go do them.” 

Steve halts again, and Bucky pauses too, his toes just at the first line of red mushrooms. “You—can you…leave here?” 

“Course,” Bucky scoffs. “ _I’m_ not a prisoner. Not of this ring, at least.” 

This is news to Steve of course, and an answer which only inspires several several more questions. But he hurries to catch up with Bucky anyway, and together they plunge into the dark, cool reaches of Brightneau and the sharp scent of green and spice of ferns. 

They walk a little ways in silence, Steve cutting unconsciously along the edge of his assigned perimeter. Bucky allows him to lead, eyes wandering aimless but interested over vines and roots. He starts humming under his breath, and Steve curls into the sound and Bucky’s presence even as he tries to focus enough to photograph the scene as they move through it. 

“This town isn’t so ugly,” Steve says after a while. “It’s not a real asphalt jungle like New York or anything. There’s still…still green things.” 

Bucky snorts, softly, shooting Steve a dry look. 

“Ugly enough.” 

“We can’t all live in trees,” Steve says, not sure why he feels the need to argue other than the fact that arguing has often been his default state of existence. “I mean sometimes I wish I could but—I like a roof overhead, when it’s raining.” 

“Mmm,” Bucky hums, noncommittally. He picks his way through a narrow row of trees, and Steve follows after more slowly—Bucky’s feet seem immune to catching on things like jutting roots, or tangles of thistle. Bucky pauses beside a small sapling, stunted but still fighting for light among its fully grown cousins, and trails his fingers over a soft curl of bright new leaves. 

“Do you know why it seems like there isn’t any magic in your modern world, Steve?” He asks finally. 

Steve considers. “Because—because people stopped believing in it?” 

Bucky’s head tips back in a laugh, and Steve’s eyes are drawn helplessly to his throat, bobbing over the sound. 

“No, not that. The fae aren’t Tinker Bell, we don’t vanish because humans are too stupid to clap for us anymore.” He levels a serious look at Steve. “Your belief isn’t the source of our power. But the earth is. And you’ve all spent a lot of years hacking her up, paving her over, making _progress_. Every time you do it pushes us a little further toward the edges, the places where green things and the power of them haven’t suffocated yet. There’s little enough space left for us in the Isles.” He looks away and shrugs. “Further away than that I don’t know. Maybe it’s different in America or on the Continent. But I’d guess not.” 

“Oh.” Steve doesn’t have any other words—he’s taken aback by the obvious simplicity of it. 

“It’s all about…” Bucky’s expression changes, suddenly alert as if he’s listening to something Steve can’t hear. Steve watches him until he nods, decisive, and stalks past Steve to crouch down between the twisting roots of an oak tree, spreading his hands through a tumbled growth of ferns. 

“Balance.” He finishes. He turns back to Steve, something cradled in his palms. His head bows over it, and Steve can see his lips moving soundlessly. Steve almost imagines that the light around Bucky’s hands increases for a moment—but then it’s actually a flash of wings, and with a trill a small speckled bird flutters up and out of them flying past Steve’s head and up into the canopy above. 

Bucky brushes his hands on his jeans and makes to move away without comment. 

“Was that—was that bird dead?” Steve asks, unable to simply start their walk again without explanation. 

“Not yet,” Bucky says, enigmatically. 

“But you—that was magic, wasn’t it? You heard it, and you saved it?” 

“It’s just balance, Steve.” Bucky says again, but this time he shifts, almost uncomfortable under the questioning. “Sometimes I can bring a little bit. These are my woods, for now.” 

Steve stumbles after him, speechless. Bucky smirks at Steve softly, and he would swear Bucky looks pleased with himself. 

They cover a little more ground after that, Steve snapping photographs mindlessly, feeling as if he has one eye and more than half his attention on Bucky at all times. But Bucky takes more of an interest in educating him now, pointing out things Steve might have missed with a low _this is interesting_ , or _look, here_ now and again. 

They stumble eventually into a little hollow, filled up with a carpet of late blooming bluebells, the color dazzling in a weak beam of sunshine filtering through the leaves. Bucky wades into it carefully, and not a stem seems to bend beneath his step as he gives a happy sigh. Steve knows his own feet are likely to do a lot more damage than a dryad’s, so he picks his way around the edge of them, lowering himself to sit on a fallen log. 

Bucky turns to him, beaming, and offers him a sprig of the blue flower. Steve accepts it, noting that Bucky’s eyes have gone almost exactly the same shade, and Steve thinks back to the wood anemone and wonders what he would find if he could look up the meaning of bluebells now. There’s a sparkle in Bucky’s eye as he takes it. 

Bucky seats himself gracefully beside Steve, folding his legs up under himself to sit crosslegged on the mossy log. 

“I think I know…a little, what you mean. About balance.” Steve says, his fingers fiddling with the soft edges of one of the small blue bells. “I try to help keep it when I can. But you’re right. Not enough people do care about it. Even in my line of work…” he trails off, frowning. He _has_ done what he could, hasn’t he? Whenever he had the chance, which he now thinks hasn’t been nearly often enough…

Bucky’s hand flicks out and grips his wrist, long fingers wrapping around it and stilling his hand with a surprisingly (still, somehow) solid grip. 

“Did you—did you turn that inside out?” He asks. Steve looks over at him, a little confused by the question. He’s even more bewildered when he finds Bucky’s face very close to his, eyes wide and mouth parted slightly as he looks over Steve’s shoulder. He can almost feel Bucky’s soft breath on his cheek, and he is overcome by the memory of that mouth against his. 

Steve clenches his jaw over a sharp little inhale and shakes himself. His eyes go back to the bluebell in his hands, and realizes what Bucky had meant. He’d been toying with the little bells, and managed to turn one of them in on itself so that it’s a reverse image of its companions—a soft downy white cup facing the opposite direction of the blue. 

“Oh—I guess?’ 

“And it didn’t rip?” Bucky prods, voice intent. 

“Um,” Steve looks at it closer. “No?” 

“Ahh, well then.” 

Steve looks at him again, eyebrows raised in question. Bucky just shakes his head, but there’s a barely suppressed smile on his face. Bucky jumps up from their log, grinning now, and ambles away again along the direction they’d been walking before, leaving Steve to follow hastily. But he puts the bluebell into his pocket first. 

Bucky’s humming again as they splash through a small brook beyond the bluebell hollow, and Steve wants badly to know what he’s thinking. But before he can ask, Bucky is pointing out an odd, frilly crown of mushrooms spilling down the side of a tree, and he gets distracted photographing it and noting it in his journal. 

“Why are you doing all of this anyway?” Bucky’s voice is light and curious, not looking at Steve as he runs his fingertips over the edge of a mossy bole in the trunk. 

Steve halts in his tracks, pencil hovering above the notepad. 

He puts it down to sheer, perhaps even willful stupidity that he didn’t anticipate the question. 

And that he himself hadn’t actually considered it, and the effects of its answer on Bucky. He feels cold all over.

 _Stupid, stupid, stupid._ Why hadn’t he thought further than a day about the significance of the circumstances under which he’d met Bucky? Had he just not wanted to know, or to consider? He’d been so wrapped up in the surreality of it and doubting if Bucky was even real that he hadn’t stopped to think once he’d finally realized that he was that Steve, that what he was doing, the reason he’d stumbled into the faerie ring in the first place, out in the woods was…

“Steve?” Bucky asks, turning away from the industrious efforts of a woodpecker that had caught his attention, high in an oak. His smile falters. 

“It’s—” Steve’s jaw works, unsure of how to answer. Then he finds with not a little horror that there isn’t any but the truth. “It’s for a building project. Some of…a bit of the forest is to be—be cleared.” 

Bucky’s face shutters instantly, any openness his expression had held immediately vanishing behind a smooth mask. “How much?” 

“I—I’m not sure.” It’s a lie. Steve knows the exact GPS coordinates of every one of the thirty-five acres proposed for the project, twelve of them cutting into the edge of Brightneau. 

“Yes you are.” 

Steve shudders. “Twelve acres from the edge of the meadowland on the town side.” 

Steve can see, even behind Bucky’s flat affect, his mind working over that number. And Steve understands now that Bucky will be aware of every leaf and nest and flower it contains. How he’s attuned to them and how he’ll feel it.

Including the hawthorn. 

But Steve also realizes, with new, terrible clarity, that he has no idea what that means. For the magic there or for Bucky, not really. 

“Bucky, I—” 

“I have to get back, Steve.” Bucky cuts him off, turning with an uncharacteristically jerky motion, weaving a little on his feet as he looks away. 

“Bucky, please, let me—”

“No.” Bucky says. He holds up a hand with a sharp gesture as Steve starts forward toward him. “Don’t follow me.” 

Bucky doesn’t spare him another backward glance as he moves off on silent feet, leaping the small stream and wading back through the sea of bluebells which seem once more to part around him. He steps between the twisted trunks of a pair of beech trees, and Steve regains his senses enough to disobey him, crashing through the bluebells himself with none of his previous care and…

There’s a flash of light—not ostentatious or obvious for what it is, and if Steve weren’t paying attention he might have thought the breeze had simply shifted the leaves above him to let a quick flare of sunlight into his eyes for a moment. But as soon as he blinks it away, Bucky is gone. Steve leans heavily with one hand on the beech trunk, searching the trees and tangles beyond for a sign of him. But he knows there’s not going to be any. Bucky only walks in human ways when it pleases him to do so— _when he wants to walk them with you_. He’s gone now from the ways that Steve could follow. He feels a little numb and a lot like an idiot. Or a villain. 

Around him, he’s aware all at once, the gloomy shadows of the forest canopy have lengthened into the grayer dimness of twilight. It’s near the time when Bucky would have bid him a gentle but firm goodbye, and pushed him off toward home. And he should, probably go. He stares helplessly at the place Bucky had vanished, and wishes that his own path weren’t in the opposite direction. 

He sticks his hand impulsively into his coat pocket so that his fingers can brush the petals of the bluebell resting there. 

Steve resists the urge to sit down on the mossy ground, and begins instead the long walk home on feet that seem to resist each step he forces them take away from Bucky.

Steve’s anger is burning too hot on his cheeks for him to feel the nighttime chill even as he sheds his coat inside his darkened flat.

He’s angry at himself—for letting this creep up on him when it should have been bearing down with the noise and distant warning bells of a fucking train. 

But he’s angrier at whatever it is that conspired to put him in this situation. The universe or fate or ill-luck. Steve doesn’t even know if he believes in any of those things, really, but he also didn’t believe in magic a week ago and now he’s seen it. And it feels like too cruel a twist after everything he’s been through not to blame something. Aside from himself. Which he’s also doing in spades. 

He runs his hands roughly through his hair, not bothering to turn on any lights as he kicks his boots into a corner. Steve makes toward his bed, intending to fling himself onto it, but changes his mind half way with a frustrated, restless gesture, and instead crosses the room to his desk and throws himself down in his chair with a huff. 

He grits his teeth over a groan and reaches for whatever self-control he’s exercised over his feelings the past few days, trying to shove them down. But it’s nowhere to be found, and they swirl around him relentlessly, a pressing weight on his chest. 

Steve grinds the heels of his hands into his eyes, holding his breath for a long moment before releasing it in a hissing sigh. He spins his chair toward the desk, slumping over it until his forehead touches the cool metal of his laptop, and he sits back with a start. 

His hands dart to open it, and he nearly groans again in impatience when it takes a moment to boot up. But it isn’t really any longer than these things usually take, and soon his eyes are searing with the bright light of the screen, and he taps roughly at the keyboard into a search bar. 

_Bluebell symbolism: With the bluebell as one of the most iconic flowers of Britain, there is little surprise that much folklore surrounds them._  
_(1) If you wear a garland of bluebells, you will be compelled to tell the truth._  
_(2) Bluebell woods are enchanted. Fairies used them to lure and trap people into their nether world._  
_(3) In the language of flowers, or floriography, a bluebell symbolizes constancy, humility, and gratitude._

Last, but certainly not least, Steve’s eyes linger on the final point. 

_(4) If you turn one of the flowers inside out without tearing it, you will eventually win the one you love._

Steve bites down hard on the inside of his cheek. He’s caught utterly between the impulse to scoff—with everything about how the day ended, it feels entirely too precious and cloying—and the fact that Bucky had beamed when he saw what Steve had done. So he can’t quite throw it away as saccharine Victorian sentiment. It had meant something to him. 

_And why should Bucky have any reason to be pleased about that?_ Asks a ruthless corner of Steve’s mind. There’s something in the answer to that that he refuses to consider. About why Bucky draws him, when it’s been easy enough just to put it down to fascination over a novelty instead of…of anything else. 

Steve’s stomach twists into an even tighter knot. 

But a new feeling is rising up to take the place of his anger—urgency. He needs to talk to Bucky. To explain himself, if he can, and to ask the questions he should have asked from the very beginning. About who Bucky is, really. And what this means. 

He snaps his laptop shut, and lets his eyes adjust to the darkness again. Through his window, he can see that it’s another cloudless night. The moon isn’t full quite, but it’s still a steady glow creeping its way over the trees. It’s enough for Steve. He thinks he could find his way to the faerie ring and hawthorn now even if there wasn’t a single speck of starlight illuminating the way. 

His chair rolls away behind him from the force with which he stands. 

It’s the work of a minute to pull his boots and coat back on before he’s slipping silently back into the calm dark chill of the night. 

***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bucky's line about holding Steve prisoner is an echo from one of my favorite Louise Gluck poems that I couldn't resist, called [Circe's Power.](https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/circe-s-power/)
> 
> _You think_
> 
>  
> 
> _A few tears upset me? My friend,_  
>  _Every sorceress is_  
>  _A pragmatist at heart; nobody sees essence who can't_  
>  _Face limitation. If I wanted only to hold you_
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> _I could hold you prisoner._


	6. Six

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm REALLY excited about this one you guys, it's about to get way more fae up in here :)

Despite the determination fueling it, Steve’s haste doesn’t actually allow him to travel through the woods after dark with any less trouble. He stubs the toes of both feet and smacks his forehead into at least one branch as he makes his way. But his urgency does at least keep him from being bothered by the pain.

There’s a faint glow about the clearing in the faerie ring. It might be the white blossoms which still cling in patches between the intruding curl of green leaves. It might be that the break in the canopy allows more of the moon and starlight to filter down onto it. Or it might be the glow of magic. 

Steve couldn’t say, but it doesn’t make a difference—even if none of it were true he thinks the place would still light up in his eyes, like the soft glow of a light in a window that means coming home to a place you know someone is waiting up for you. 

And he is. 

Bucky is lying amongst the tall grass at the foot of the hawthorn, back against the trunk and long legs crossed before him. His hands are resting in his lap, palms up, as if they’d held something recently, or are waiting to hold something soon. His eyes are closed, but his face is creased with worry, contradicting the easy repose of his body. 

His clothes are odd, too, Steve notices as he crosses the glade. Since that first day, he’s appeared in simple but modern things, so much so that Steve didn’t even really remark on them after the first, jarring imitation of his own wardrobe. But tonight he’s wearing a loose button-down shirt, with the cuffs rolled up over his forearms, and trousers in a rough gray wool, cut high on his waist and creased down the front. There’s even suspenders over his shoulders, cutting down the line of his chest. It’s an incongruous look, out of place and out of time, almost like a costume—except he inhabits it too easily, and has no reason Steve can think of to wear one. 

Bucky doesn’t open his eyes as Steve approaches, though Steve knows him well enough to know he’d heard him coming from much farther off than Steve’s hearing would have permitted. But he lets out a long sigh as Steve sinks down into the grass beside him, not quite close enough for their shoulders to touch. 

Steve, for all that he’s brimming with the hundred and one things he came here desperate to say, feels now somehow that this spell of silence isn’t his to break. So he just sits beside Bucky, listening to the faint sound of his breath and the further, distant choir of crickets beyond. 

At last, Bucky tips his head back against the hawthorn trunk, throat pale at the open collar of his shirt. 

“I was human, once,” he says. His voice is soft, but the words still ring through Steve with the shock of a gunshot in the hushed clearing. Now Bucky’s eyes do slit open, long, dark lashes fanned low over his cheeks. “Before this, I think…I was a person.” 

He lifts his eyes to Steve’s, and his face does something complicated that almost, maybe could be mistaken for an attempt at a smile—if only his eyes weren’t so unspeakably sad. His cheek twitches and he drops his gaze again, to somewhere around the hollow of Steve’s throat. He tips forward, just slightly, but Steve’s breath catches anyway. Bucky’s still not close enough to touch, though he’s curled in toward Steve now. Steve can see Bucky’s pulse jumping against the thin skin under his jaw, and his hands almost ache with the urge to press against it, to pull Bucky against his chest. 

Instead he licks his lips, mouth unaccountably dry, to form the only question that comes to him. 

“How do you know?” 

Bucky’s mouth quirks up—it’s more like an actual smile this time, but a rueful one. 

“You.” He says, and his eyes flick up again to Steve’s face, and Steve’s breath almost catches again and he thinks vaguely that he hasn’t had so much trouble breathing since he grew out of his childhood fevers, but Bucky’s eyes are a color he hasn’t seen before, a pure, sky blue, and it’s almost enough. Bucky’s lips part and he lets out a breath that sounds unsteady. “These days with you. I haven’t spent time with humans since…but I’ve spent it with you and I think that I remember. I remember something, at least. Of what it would have been like if we were the same.” 

“What do you remember?” Steve asks, his voice coming out as a cracked whisper. 

Bucky’s face is still tipped up toward him, but his eyes go distant, seeing something beyond Steve’s face. 

“Dancing.” He says at last. “I remember dancing.” He closes his eyes and smiles for a moment, expression dreamy. But it’s gone in a blink, and his forehead creases, mouth turning down into grim lines. “And I remember pain. In my back, through my chest…and then it was dark. And I woke up, and I was something else.” 

Steve doesn’t know what to say, his mind races with the possibilities but can’t land on anything other than how he hates the look of agony on Bucky’s face, and he finally raises a shaky hand to brush a long lock of Bucky’s hair back from his furrowed brow. He lets his fingertips trail to tuck it behind Bucky’s ear, and his palm comes to rest against the sharp line of Bucky’s jaw. 

A muscle jumps in Bucky’s jaw, but he doesn’t pull away. After a moment, he leans into the touch. Steve’s surprised, distantly, that there is the beginning of rough stubble under his fingertips, and when he runs his thumb over Bucky’s high cheekbone he thinks his face might even be flushed. But it’s too hard to be sure in the blue moonlight. 

“Bucky…” Steve breathes, unsure if he’s starting a sentence or just tasting the name on his tongue as the prelude to something else, and Bucky swallows, throat bobbing under Steve’s wrist. 

Bucky looks up again. “Steve,” he says back, in the same hushed tone that might be a prayer or a plea. 

Then his eyes widen, and his hand flies up to grip Steve’s, yanking it from its resting place against his cheek, and Steve’s heart clenches that he went too far…

But Bucky doesn’t release his hand, even as his mouth drops open in an expression of horror, and his gaze flickers wildly out into the clearing. 

“Steve,” he says again, this time urgently, and Steve’s stomach drops at the note of fear in his voice. “Steve it’s—it’s after dark, you shouldn’t—why did you come here at night? You’ve got to—”

Bucky stands in a fast, fluid motion, dragging Steve to his feet. Steve allows himself to be dragged, helplessly lost as Bucky’s eyes dart around the edge of the dark forest. 

“You have to go now, you can’t be here—get outside the ring and don’t—”

Steve feels like his thoughts are moving through molasses, trying to understand Bucky’s sudden fear. He stops, still feeling Bucky’s insistent tug on their linked hands, and blinks at the twisted oak trees in front of them…they were dark, he’d thought, but now…

Bucky groans and stops his pulling, lifting his free hand to run though his hair in something like distress. Why is he worried? Steve thinks, hazily. Light is good—he wants light, if they’re going walking through the woods at night, and the glow of it is warm, between the trees…

Steve takes a step forward toward it, and Bucky whirls, one hand still in his and the other bracing it against Steve’s shoulder to keep him from moving any further, and Steve is confused again—it was Bucky who’d said they should go, wasn’t it? They should keep walking, now that the path is so clear…

“Steve,” Bucky says, shaking him by the shoulder, and Steve drags his eyes from the glow between the trees with great effort and tries to focus, tries to remember why Bucky’s voice has grown so desperate. “Steve listen to me, you have to— _don’t let go_ of my hand, okay? Whatever you do don’t—”

Steve tries to focus, he really does, but his eyes are pulled again to the edge of the faerie ring, and the inviting soft forest path between the oaks, and Bucky groans again. 

“ _Fuck_ ,” Bucky says under his breath. And then the hand at Steve’s shoulder is gripping roughly in his hair, and Bucky’s mouth is on his, hot and demanding, and his hazy brain snaps instantly back to Bucky. His arm snakes around Bucky’s waist of its own accord to pull him close as he kisses him back. 

Bucky lets out a small noise that isn’t quite a sob, and Steve’s tongue slips between his parted lips as he kisses him harder, hungrily. And Bucky’s fingers tighten in his hair, holding him there as his own tongue chases Steve’s, and for a feverish moment it’s like they’re sharing the same ragged breath. 

It’s over far too soon. Bucky pulls back again, hand on the back of Steve’s neck, grounding him, and Steve stares back in shock. 

“Are you listening?” Bucky asks, just this side of panic. 

“I— _yes_ ,” Steve gasps, nodding. Bucky’s definitely got his attention now, and everything speeds back up to normal—and he recognizes enough to be afraid. 

“Good,” Bucky says, with palpable relief, and he fixes his eyes on Steve’s intently, squeezing his hand again at Steve’s nape. “Whatever you do, don’t let go of my hand— _no matter what_ , Steve. Don’t eat or drink _anything_ —you have to promise me you won’t let them— _promise_ me Steve—”

“I promise,” Steve says, and he’s careful that his voice is firm, so Bucky knows he means it, even if he doesn’t understand yet what Bucky is asking, or why he’s sacred. And it seems to help. Bucky squeezes his eyes shut tight for a moment and nods. 

“If you hear music,” he says, “try not to listen.” 

Steve’s about to open his mouth to ask why, finally getting his feet under him enough to formulate the question when he realizes that there is fog swirling around their knees. Fog that didn’t rise in the normal, shifting way it should. 

Moreover, the fog is tinged with gold. 

Bucky turns to stand beside him, still not releasing the vise-like grip he has on Steve’s hand, so that they’re shoulder to shoulder. 

Ready to face whatever it is that Steve now, belatedly, realizes is headed their way—along a forest path gleaming at midnight with golden afternoon sunshine.

The golden fog continues swirling higher around them, engulfing them up to the waist, and Bucky takes a small step nearer, pressing against Steve from shoulder to wrist, fingers entwined between them.

Soon Steve can see nothing but the pale fog, and it presses in around his nose and mouth and eyes and fills his lungs. If it weren’t for the solid heat of Bucky’s body next to his he could believe that he was dissolving into it too, along with the earth around him and under his feet. And even as he grips Bucky’s hand he still feels panic building in him, threatening to overwhelm him. 

But then, as suddenly as it had swallowed him, the fog thins and dissipates as if it had never been. 

There are still trees in front of them. But instead of the crooked, organic tumble of old forest twisting in on itself, they now face a long colonnade of oak trees, each standing straight and tall beside the next. Between them, rolled out like a carpet in front of Steve and Bucky’s feet, is smooth turf, the grass as uniform as if it had been tended by a fastidious gardener. 

And at the end of it, where the unearthly golden light shines the brightest, is a strange and beautiful tableau. A long, high table rests on a dais of moss, the light winking off of gold and silver cups and platters heaped with things. At the table sits a host of bright figures, and the scene looks for all the world like it was painted on canvas and hung before them. Or would, if it weren’t for the subtle movements of the subjects. 

Bucky takes a step forward, and Steve steps with him, unwilling to lose the comforting press of him at his side. They move in lock step down the hall of oaks until Bucky brings them to a stop, ten paces back from the high table. 

There are a dozen or so people— _no, not people_ Steve corrects himself, _faeries_ —seated there, and very few of them even turn from their conversations to acknowledge Bucky and Steve’s presence. Only one, actually. A woman with gleaming red hair and ivory skin rises gracefully from her seat at the center, moving around the end to descend the mossy stairs toward them. 

Steve blinks, rapidly, finding that either his eyes or his mind can’t seem to focus on anything about her, aside from the color of her hair. Her clothing shifts too—one moment he’s certain she’s wearing a gown of moss, the next of shimmering emerald satin. Something black and glittering flutters behind her, and he’d swear they were wings before it falls back against her shoulders as a cape of black lace. 

“James,” she says, her voice dry and amused. “You’ve decided to join our feasting at last—and with a guest. What a pleasant surprise. But he looks a bit lost. Humans, they always need a hand don’t they?” Her bright green eyes flick down at where their hands are joined, and there’s something meaningful in her tone that makes Bucky’s shoulders tense beside him. “Why don’t I help with that…?” 

She raises a slender, pale hand, and Bucky makes a sharp, aborted gesture before stopping himself. “Natasha—” he growls. 

Natasha smiles, sphinxlike, and raises the hand higher. “Relax, just helping you both settle in. You’re underdressed for us, and we’re particular about these things.” 

She flicks her wrist at them, and there’s a flash of light. Steve blinks the spots from his eyes hastily, and finds that when they clear he can look at her directly, and her features stay put. She looks now only like an exceptionally beautiful, fine-boned woman in a dark green gown. It’s still enough to worry him. Her eyes are glued on Steve’s face, her expression wicked and knowing. 

“That feels better, doesn’t it, human? Almost as if you didn’t arrive without an invitation.” 

Steve shakes his head slightly, not understanding. But then he looks down and realizes he’s been re-dressed as well. He looks like a prince from a faerie tale ( _oh god_ , he thinks, a little hysterical, _this_ is _a faerie tale, but I don’t think it’s the right kind_ ). A deep blue velvet coat stretches across his chest, silver cords of embroidery looping over his shoulders. His jeans have been replaced in favor of what he is forced to call _breeches_ , tucked into tall boots. He’s only missing the fucking sword. 

He looks back up, knowing that Natasha is playing with him for reasons he can only begin to guess at. But Natasha has turned her green gaze to Bucky. 

“Don’t you think so, James?” she asks in a dangerously low voice. 

Bucky shudders beside him, and Steve tears his eyes from Natasha to look at him. Bucky has been transformed too, in a shirt with white flowing sleeves beneath a glossy black vest, elaborately criss-crossed across the front to emphasize his lithe figure. It would look roguish, if it weren’t for the crown of white hawthorn blossoms woven through his hair. Bucky’s brow is lowered as he glares at Natasha, pointedly not looking down at either of their costumes. 

“Let him _be_ ,” Bucky says. 

Natasha laughs, and it’s the most frightening sound she’s made yet. 

“That’s not how this works.” Her gaze slides sideways to Steve again, and he tries to draw himself up with something like confidence that he doesn’t feel. “Besides, he came into a faerie ring, maybe he doesn’t want to be let alone. You look tired—was it a long walk? A drink maybe…?” She says the last almost sweetly, and suddenly there’s a golden cup in her hand as she offers it. 

Steve’s mouth is instantly dry—drier than it’s ever felt before, and whatever is in the cup smells sweet and light and honeyed. But Bucky’s nails dig into the palm of his hand and he remembers what he promised. 

“No—thank you,” he manages to croak around his painfully parched throat. 

Natasha laughs again, and this time it’s echoed by a few other voices behind her. It’s not a pleasant laugh—it’s the laugh of a joke at his expense, even if he doesn’t know yet what it is. 

“So polite.” She flicks her eyes at Bucky. “Polite and well-coached.” 

“Offer again, Natasha, ” comes a soft voice from the table, and Steve’s eyes find the speaker: a tall faerie with the palest skin Steve’s ever seen, set off by a fall of black hair braided over his shoulder. His mouth is twisted in a sardonic smile. “Or maybe we should have a dance, and see if he’s any thirstier then.” 

Bucky lets out a puff of breath that sounds like he’s been punched, but holds very still. 

“A dance, Loki?” Natasha muses, smirking. “And will you partner him?” 

Loki lets out an elegant snort, looking at Steve down his aristocratic nose. “I think not. I know two left feet when I see them.” 

“Always so quick to make suggestions that you have no intention of carrying out yourself.” Another voice rings out from the end of the table—a dark skinned woman in a silver breastplate and silver jewelry around her bare arms that looks more like armor than attire for a ball, and intricate iridescent paint around her eyes. She narrows them at Steve, calculating. Then she grins merrily, and throws back the contents of her goblet, wiping the back of her hand across her mouth. “Refill me once or twice more and I’ll have a go, I don’t mind a bruised toe or two.” 

“Have three Val, then you can just let him carry you about for a few turns and you’ll never be the wiser anyway.” A silver-haired man on her left chimes in. Then he, too, gives Steve a feral looking grin. “Or wait till the dryad breaks that hand off entirely, and have whatever fun you like.” 

Steve doesn’t understand the game being played here, but he knows enough to keep his mouth shut. Because even without knowing the rules, he remembers enough of his mom’s stories to know that the stakes will all be his to pay. That’s what happens to humans who wander into faerie rings, the thing Bucky has been trying to warn him about in his way since the first—if only Steve had been listening. 

Bucky’s fingers twitch convulsively against Steve’s but he doesn’t relinquish his grip. He opens his mouth to speak, but is preempted by a gentle voice from the man’s other side. 

“Hush, brother.” Her voice almost frail, like the sound of a brook you can’t see, making its way over a stream bed. “If you crave that kind of violence you could have attended the Hunt tonight instead, and left us in peace.” Despite her quiet tone, her words are full of steel, and her brother pouts and slouches in his seat. 

Loki speaks again, leaning forward like a bird of prey. “The Hunt lacks subtlety that some of us crave, Wanda. And some things that bleed and die do so _very_ peacefully, isn’t that right, dryad?” 

“You go too far, Loki,” Bucky snarls, finally goaded, his body jerking as if he’d like to storm the table. 

“Is. That. So.” Loki stares unblinking back at Bucky, emphasis on each word. His mouth curls in satisfaction. “Perhaps it is you who we ought to send somewhere else to learn manners, and let your human have his fun with us—and we with him—without your dourness intruding.”

Bucky squares his shoulders. “It was _my_ ring he entered. It’s up to me to decide what happens to him.” 

Loki opens his mouth again, clearly intending to argue. 

“Your ring in _our_ woods, James,” says a new woman from the other end of the table. Her voice is cool and inscrutable, and she sounds almost disinterested. In fact until now she’d had her head turned entirely away from the conversation, her attention on a bored looking man with angular features and light blond hair. The man still looks bored, and he sighs like he’s annoyed to have the conversation interrupt him, and looks away languidly into the trees. But the woman, whose brown hair is swept off her bare shoulders like a crown, stares down at them both seriously. “Do you forget the terms of your citizenship? You are welcome among the Night Court, but you are not one of us. Only a little more than he is.” 

Natasha, who has been quiet through the volley behind her, now hums thoughtfully. “A fair question Maria. _Do_ you remember the terms by which you enjoy a position with this Court, James? And do you know who this human is, how he threatens to bring that position to a swift end?” 

Steve’s mouth drops open in alarm, but Bucky takes a half-step forward as if to shield him. Steve wonders if the faerie court can see how Bucky’s body is quivering, or if only Steve is close enough to tell. When he speaks, his words don’t give any sign of it. 

“You don’t know anything about him.” 

Natasha’s eyes glint ominously, and she draws herself up to her full height, which a moment ago Steve wouldn’t have said was very tall, but he shrinks back anyway from the raw power rolling off of her as she turns her eyes to him again. 

“Do we not know what you are, Steven Grant Rogers? Son of Sarah, of the _foraoise ag gáire_?” 

Another laugh goes around the table, and this time Bucky looks as surprised as Steve as he starts back from them, and that frightens Steve more than anything else. Steve looks at Bucky, wide-eyed, and Bucky’s face mirrors the same confusion back to him without any reassuring understanding there.

“What do _you_ think, Fionn?” Loki asks, and his face is entirely too smug. The bored blond man at the end of the table rolls his head to give him a dispassionate look, jaw working a little.

“What is it to me?” 

Loki smirks even harder. “What indeed...?” 

“Now you _do_ go too far Loki,” chides a new voice. She’s seated beside Loki, but rises from her seat anyway, palms on the table, to loom over him. She looks a little like Maria, but her hair hangs down in waves, and her face shows a hundred expressions in the blink of an eye where Maria’s has remained carefully neutral. “We will send you on the Hunt the next time after all, where there are fewer rules to how you make your sport.” 

Loki scoffs, But Steve notices that he doesn’t hold the woman’s gaze, tossing the black plait of his hair over his shoulder with a huff. 

“Perhaps it is you, Hope, who ought to be on the Hunt if you are so eager to make use of your stingers.” 

Even to Steve’s ears Loki sounds petulant, and Hope sits down again without deigning to answer him. 

“Give me your hand, Steven.” Natasha says, recalling his attention to her and holding out her own slender one palm up. 

At once, Steve’s fingers begin to itch, and he feels them compelled to obey. But he balls them into a fist, and Steve looks at Bucky instead where he is still angled partially in front of him, looking for guidance, not sure if he can or should refuse (or keep trying to refuse, at least, for however long he can hold out). He feels a force pulling at his wrist that he resists, and there’s a curious murmur from the table behind Natasha as he does. 

“Would you set yourself against us then, dryad, on his behalf?” Asks a third man with ebony skin and a deep, rumbling voice. His eyes are yellow like a hawk’s, and his gaze rests keenly on Bucky. 

“There’s nothing James can do for you—give me your _hand_ ,” Natasha snaps, for the first time seeming shaken from her perfect composure by something else—annoyance at Steve’s disobedience, he thinks. And he’s not sure that it means anything good for him, but he’s also sure that giving in to her has every likelihood of being as bad or worse, so he clenches his fist tighter and doubles down on his determination to defy the pull her command. 

Natasha blinks at him, nonplussed. Then her eyes go black and Steve wonders if he has just taken a grave misstep. She makes a sharp gesture at Bucky. “Maybe he’s fool enough that he _does_ know you, human, and your intentions, and chooses to defend you anyway. But do _you_ know whose hand you hold? The nature of your defender?” 

Bucky makes a hurt little noise in his throat, and his hand stiffens in Steve’s. Steve frowns down at it, and sees that Bucky’s skin, beginning at his fingertips, is going rough like bark. It climbs his arm beneath the flowing sleeve of his shirt, and over the top of the white fabric from his shoulder, moving downward, snake small creeping tendrils, like the new growth of branches, weaving themselves around it. Steve looks back up into Bucky’s face, framed by hair scattered through with leaves, and Bucky is looking back with sorrow—and something like shame. His eyes too, have gone the same obsidian black as Natasha’s, and his usually ruddy cheeks are tinged with green. 

He turns his face away from Steve, trying to hide it. 

And Steve finally feels the spark of anger he needed—the one that’s always been there for him when things have reached their worst, allowing him to plant his feet like roots and turn back to meet Natasha’s eyes. 

It’s the same flame of temper that’s gotten him into enough brawls in the alleys of Brooklyn to know he’s willing to back it up whatever it takes. Natasha and her cohort might be able to throw something more than a punch, he thinks, but the principle is the same as it’s always been. He’s never been able to stand by and watch somebody else take a hit when he had the option to step up and take it himself instead, and he hates how the line of Bucky’s shoulders looks hunched away from him. 

“That’s _enough_.” He says, the words ringing out sure and steady. 

Natasha raises one perfect arch of an eyebrow. Behind her, Val sets down her goblet, and the soft-voiced woman, Wanda, leans forward intently. 

“You think it’s an illusion?” Natasha asks, voice pitched much lower than Steve’s. “It’s the absence of illusion.” 

“I don’t care,” Steve says, shaking his head. He squeezes Bucky’s hand tighter, unsure if he can even feel it beneath the bark of his skin. But it’s true—he doesn’t care. 

“You don’t _care_? You stand next to him without even knowing that you’re actually on opposite sides of a battle line—you don’t even know the ways you thwart each other even now.” 

Steve’s jaw clenches against the poison she’s attempting to work under his skin. And he repeats, firmer, “ _I don’t care what you say_.” 

“Indeed.” Natasha says. It’s not quite a question, but it’s not quite not a question either. She cocks her head at him for a moment, and her eyes, which have receded to their original jade green, feel like they’re boring a hole through his. Then she releases his gaze, and sweeps the full skirt of her gown around, turning her back on them to remount the mossy dais. 

“Fine then. You can go.” She says with her back to them, not bothering to speak over her shoulder. She reseats herself in the center of the long table. 

Steve takes a gasping breath, not even having realized he was holding it, and Bucky’s hand is suddenly pliable, warm skin again in his. 

They half turn before Wanda’s silvery voice stops them one last time, both caught in the soothing snare of it. The rest of the faces at the table turn toward her too, and despite the fact that out of all of them her face is the kindest, and her presence the least like a blazing sunbeam and more like the shadows such light casts, it’s clear that they all are accustomed to listening when she speaks. 

“Remember, both of you, what you decided here. When this night is done.” 

There’s a pregnant pause as her words ripple out across the space. Then, almost as one, the Court turns back to whatever conversation they’d been engaged in before Steve and Bucky arrived, for all appearances as if they’d never been interrupted at all. 

Bucky shudders, and turns away from the scene without looking back. And Steve, his hand by this point feeling that it’s cemented itself in Bucky’s, has no choice but to turn away with him. 

***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> as always your comments are so so appreciated, I am loving them!


	7. Seven

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And now...time for a little sexy forest interlude. Did I mention this is my first E I've posted? Let me know how it goes ;)

They step together over the mushrooms of the ring into Bucky’s glade.

Steve had resisted the urge to look back as long as Bucky kept his face forward, afraid maybe of some condition he didn’t know and being trapped there by the glance like Eurydice. 

But as soon as they cross the ring Bucky releases his hand, stumbling forward, and Steve risks a quick look over his shoulder. But all that is behind them is a dark tangle of woods. The light and the hall of oaks is gone. 

Bucky doesn’t even look, maybe knowing it won’t be there. He staggers directly for the hawthorn, leaning heavily against it with trembling palms. Steve follows him. 

Up close he can see that it’s not just Bucky’s hands, his whole body is trembling like a leaf, drawing in shaky, wracking breaths. 

Steve realizes that he’s feeling a bit unsteady on his own feet, the effects of adrenaline and fear leaving his system. Well, adrenaline leaving, anyway. The fear hasn’t gone. 

“Bucky,” he says, worried, “are you alright? Did it—did she hurt you?”

Bucky shakes his head wordlessly, and presses his forehead to the bark of the hawthorn. 

“What they said, about you—about us—what did—”

Bucky whirls around, halting the question in its tracks with the look of anguish on his face. 

“Steve, please don’t—not yet, I can’t—” he closes his eyes, and the rigid lines of his body slump. He chews on his bottom lip and looks up at Steve again, and there’s a pleading note in his voice as he asks, just above a whisper, “Would you just…could you just hold me? Just—stay—for a little.” 

“ _Yes_ ,” Steve’s breath rushes out of him in a whoosh, and he holds his arms up at once. All of his questions vanish for the time being, replaced by the desire to do as Bucky asks. 

Bucky staggers forward, collapsing against his chest, and Steve wraps his arms about him as tight as he can, willing the little quakes still running through him to cease. 

They stand like that for a long time before Bucky’s breathing begins to even out, and Steve finds himself matching the rhythm with his own deliberate, steady inhales and exhales. 

Eventually, Bucky shifts a little where he’s crushed against him, freeing his arms to wrap more comfortably around Steve’s waist and laying his head on Steve’s shoulder. Steve sways gently, and then takes a small step backward so that Bucky can anticipate and move with him, setting his back to the hawthorn trunk and sliding down to sit between the roots. 

He’s not sure, but he thinks the tree may shift to accommodate them. At least, as he arranges his legs to half lie at the foot of it, it seems like the gnarled roots at the surface bend away around them, and the little sunken hollow they create is carpeted with particularly soft moss beneath them. 

Bucky resettles himself, angling to lay beside Steve, but keeps his head on Steve’s chest and his arms around his waist. After a moment of hesitation, he also hooks one of his legs over Steve’s, leaving them fully tangled up in each other’s limbs. 

Steve rests his cheek on Bucky’s soft hair, and can’t help but think of what Natasha had shown him, and how it had been twined through with leaves. He lets out a little huff of air at the thought, scoffing at the idea that she had intended it to repulse him, to drive him away maybe. But Bucky hadn’t been any less beautiful. Steve turns his face slightly, burying his nose in the silky strands, and thinks the scent there is an echo of the forest around them—new leaves and night breezes. 

Bucky’s hand leaves Steve’s waist, moving upward to curl in a handful of his sweater. He sighs, warm breath ghosting over Steve’s neck, below his ear, and Steve shivers involuntarily. 

“Your heart is still racing,” Bucky whispers. 

And then he presses his lips to the place where Steve’s pulse is beating beneath his jaw, and Steve knows if it wasn’t true a moment ago it definitely is now. 

Steve doesn’t answer. But before Bucky can pull away he slides one of his own hands from around Bucky’s shoulders to twine in his hair, holding him in place in unspoken invitation. 

He tips his head up into Steve’s touch, and continues the trail his lips along Steve’s throat, the line of his jaw, a graze of teeth at his earlobe. 

Steve’s intentional, even breathing falters, coming more shallowly as Bucky’s warm mouth wanders, maintaining a light, barely there contact that has Steve aching for more, but unable to do anything about it. He doesn’t know what Bucky wants or needs from him in this moment—but he knows he’s willing to give him anything he asks. Even if it’s just for arms around him. 

Bucky shifts up a little, his hand releasing Steve’s sweater to slide up his jaw, at last angling Steve’s face down for a real kiss. 

It’s not anything like either of their previous two—without the calculating look of the first, or the rough desperation of the second only a few hours ago. 

Bucky’s mouth is gentle now on his, almost tentative, just a whisper of a kiss, really. He pulls back, searching Steve’s face. His eyes are again that clear, sky blue Steve saw for the first time earlier tonight and he doesn’t know what it means in the catalogue of Bucky’s shifting humors, but he feels like it’s important. He lets Bucky’s hair slip between his fingers, stroking it back from his face. 

“What do you want?” he whispers. 

“I want…” Bucky trails off, eyes flickering down where he runs the pad of his thumb over Steve’s bottom lip. He tips forward, and Steve lets his lips part, ready for the kiss—but Bucky diverts again to press his mouth to Steve’s pulse point. When he mumbles the next words against Steve’s skin, Steve can feel as much as hear them, a low thrum under his ear. “I just…want to feel your skin on mine.”

Steve’s head is tilted at an angle to allow Bucky whatever access he wants, but he nods. 

Bucky’s hands drift down to the hem of Steve’s sweater, but seem to get stuck there, hesitating. Steve looks again at Bucky’s face—and the expression is vulnerable, almost pleading. So Steve tightens his hands at Bucky’s waist and twists, hauling Bucky onto his lap. And Bucky goes willingly, flinging the leg that had been tangled in Steve’s across him and sitting back so that he’s straddling Steve’s thighs, fingers still lingering at the edge of his sweater. 

Steve smiles and sits up a little from his half sprawl. He trails his fingertips across Bucky’s, eyes glued to his face, before he brushes them out of the way and whips his sweater and undershirt off over his head. 

He shivers slightly at the chill of the night air on his bare torso. Bucky’s mouth twitches in a smile. He rests one palm in the center of Steve’s chest, just above his breastbone to push him back down, and makes a slight gesture with the other to his side—and suddenly the air is much warmer around them, comfortable even in a state of semi-undress. 

Steve watches Bucky’s eyes as they travel from his face, across his shoulders, down his bare chest as if he’s memorizing him. Steve wavers, briefly. Then he lifts his hands to Bucky’s shoulders, and slides them under the suspenders, raising his eyebrows in request. Bucky swallows visibly and nods, and Steve slips them off his shoulders before going for the buttons of Bucky’s shirt. 

He takes his time with the buttons while Bucky’s fingertips roam, tracing the lines of him. But at last he reaches the end of them, tugging the tails of the shirt free and pushing it back down Bucky’s arms until Bucky finishes the job, shucking it to one side. Then Bucky leans down again and crawls up Steve’s body to press them flush against each other, chest to chest and skin to skin, and Bucky’s mouth returns to his. 

There’s no hesitation this time from either side as Steve’s mouth opens under Bucky’s. His hands fall into place at Bucky’s ribcage as Bucky slides one of his under Steve’s head to tip his face upward, his other cradling Steve’s jaw as he kisses him. 

Everything else disappears. Everything but Bucky’s weight pressing him into the cool earth, and Bucky’s heart beating against his own, and Bucky’s mouth, at once a fire and a flood—threatening to reduce him to smoke or sweep him away, and he knows he’d welcome it gladly. His hand finds its way back into Bucky’s hair. 

There’s little sound in the hush of the clearing but for the occasional gasping breath and the whisper of hands on each other’s skin. 

It doesn’t even occur to Steve to wonder where it’s going, like he would in the usual order of things. Because it feels to him like every moment and every breath they’re sharing is a stolen one, like it all might evaporate at any second, and he can’t let that happen without one more kiss, and one more, and another. So he closes his eyes shut tight and chases Bucky’s tongue with his and gives in to the sensation that he’s dissolving under Bucky’s touch. 

Time bends around them strangely, seeming to part around them in the same way the roots of the hawthorn had done—creating an odd little bubble in which exists only this moment, everything standing still just for this. 

Then Bucky’s thumb brushes across his nipple, and every atom in Steve’s body snaps back into immediate, clear focus like a match struck low in his belly. It pulls a moan from him, startling in the silence. Bucky freezes at the sound—then drops his forehead to press against Steve’s with an answering groan of his own. He circles again with his thumb, this time with intention. 

Steve flattens his palm against Bucky’s back, pressing against it, though it’s impossible to pull him any closer, and Bucky pants into his mouth as he lets the heel of his hand slide up to replace his thumb in an agonizing drag up and down over Steve’s pec. Steve does his best not to writhe. But his increasingly ragged breathing betrays him anyway, and Bucky scrapes softly over the sensitive bud with his thumbnail and Steve feels like he’s flying apart at the seams. 

“ _Buck_ ,” he rasps, at last, helplessly arching into him. 

Bucky groans again, not bothering to smother the noise this time, and he slides further down Steve’s body. He latches his searing mouth at the soft juncture of Steve’s neck and shoulder, setting his teeth and tongue to worry at it in turns as he gets both hands on Steve’s chest. Before his explorations had been aimless, but now his hands and his lips work together feverishly to pull more desperate noises from Steve. And between the wet heat of Bucky’s mouth at his throat and the maddening play of his fingers on Steve’s tight nipples, Steve’s earlier indifference about where this is headed vanishes as white-hot pleasure pools in his gut, demanding to be chased as he molds his body into Bucky’s. 

His hands fly of their own accord to Bucky’s hips, and Bucky grinds down responsively in his lap, his hands abandoning Steve’s chest to clutch at his shoulders like he needs an anchor. He sits back to rock himself against Steve, and Steve is struck again, as if for the first time, by the full force of how beautiful he is. 

It’s absurd to him that he once thought that beauty remote and unreal, because now Bucky’s hair is mussed and wild from Steve’s fingers and his brow is creased in concentration and a sheen of sweat shines on his tanned olive skin. And he’s decidedly hard straddling Steve’s lap. He’s so _real_ it threatens to overwhelm Steve’s senses entirely. 

Bucky’s eyes are on Steve’s face as he looks down at him, and he must read some of those things there because he makes a choked off noise in his throat and dips his head, fingers clenching harder into Steve’s shoulders. Steve shudders and grinds up against him again, tightening his hold on Bucky’s waist. Bucky’s soft wool trousers do even less than Steve’s jeans to hide his arousal, and Steve places the flat of his palm against Bucky’s stomach to feel the way his abdominal muscles tense under his skin with each rock of his hips. Steve slips his hand lower, brushes a thumb under the waistband, and then lower again to palm over Bucky’s hard length. 

Bucky moans again and leans into it, eyes slipping shut for a moment as Steve rubs at him through the fabric. But when Steve moves for the button of his pants, Bucky’s eyes fly open again, and his hands snap to Steve’s wrists. 

“Wait,” he says, voice wrecked already. Steve stops moving at once, chest heaving with the effort but trying to let Bucky set the pace of whatever this is, however much he wants more. 

Bucky’s grip is firm around Steve’s wrists, and he keeps his eyes fixed on Steve’s as he eases his hands down beside his head, pressing them into the mossy cushion. He looks debauched and wonderful, pupils glittering black and mouth shiny from kisses, and his arms are strong and lean bracketing Steve’s head, holding him down. Steve shivers pleasantly at the sensation, testing the hold a little and finding Bucky’s strength to be more than a match for him even if he wanted to break it. He stops resisting, letting his body yield to Bucky’s. 

Bucky sucks in a breath, and leans into his grip on Steve’s wrists. “Not yet—” he says, “I want to—just…stay still.” Steve bites at his bottom lip and nods. 

Bucky slithers a little further down his body, and Steve does his best to do as he’s told when Bucky releases his wrists, leaving them still in the cool moss. Bucky slides a thigh between Steve’s though, and Steve can’t help the noise that escapes him. Bucky flicks another look at what Steve assumes must be the utterly hazy, helpless look on his own face and smirks. Then he hunches over him, and once again begins a trail of barely there kisses down his neck, dipping into the hollow of his throat with his tongue as if he has no sense of hurry at all, just tasting him. 

Steve’s fingers itch to twist back in Bucky’s hair, to pull him down harder, rougher against him. But he resists. Bucky seems to intuit what he’s thinking though, and he smiles against Steve’s skin before nipping sharply at his collar bone, first one and then the other. 

“You’re so perfect, Steve,” Bucky mumbles into his skin before licking a stripe up his sternum. “I just…need a minute.” 

Steve’s trying to formulate a coherent response—to voice something of the awe he feels, how he can’t understand how Bucky can use a word like _perfect_ on Steve when every single thing about _him_ has Steve out of his mind—but that’s when Bucky bites down hard on his pec, just above the nipple, and he can only make another strangled, inarticulate noise and hope he understands. 

Bucky maintains a torturous pace as he moves down Steve’s body, kissing and licking and biting by turns until every inch is burning with his touch. 

At last he stops, hovering at the top of Steve’s jeans. He looks up again then to meet Steve’s eyes, his own dark in the moonlight, and trails the tip of one finger through the light hair below Steve’s navel to alight on the button at his fly. 

“You want me to, right?” He asks, voice husky. 

Steve gapes, giving him a look so incredulous that Bucky’s face breaks into a grin and he laughs. He brings his other hand up to work Steve’s zipper open. 

“Okay,” he says, and licks his lips. “But just so you know I—haven’t done this in a long, long time.” 

“’S’okay,” Steve says, trying very hard not to slur and not entirely succeeding. “Doing pretty good so far.” 

Bucky chuckles darkly, and hooks his fingers in the waistband of Steve’s jeans. He glances up one more time, and sucks his bottom lip between his teeth. “You can use your hands again, if you want.” 

And that’s the only warning Steve gets before Bucky yanks down his jeans and boxers in one motion and takes him into his mouth. 

Steve’s glad Bucky freed him from his promise to be still, because he’s positive he would’ve broken it now anyway despite his best intentions as Bucky _finally_ sets to work where Steve has been aching for him for however long they’ve been at this—a few minutes? A few hours? He has no idea. But his hands feel at home twining through the long soft strands of Bucky’s hair as Bucky works himself further and further down onto Steve’s cock. 

Bucky, as it turns out, is all talk—that is to say, however long it’s been since he did this for anybody, it doesn’t fucking matter. Steve pushes the curtain of Bucky’s hair back from his eyes so he can see his face, eyelashes dark on his cheeks and mouth already roughened from kisses now wrapped around him, face framed between Steve’s bent knees. 

Bucky makes a long, low hum of pleasure when Steve hits the back of his throat the first time, fingers digging ruthlessly into Steve’s flanks as if to pull him deeper. Steve’s thighs tighten involuntarily on either side of Bucky’s face, and Bucky redoubles his efforts, little desperate sounds dropping from him now at every dip of his head. 

And maybe Steve’s been ready since Bucky pressed his lips against his pulse or maybe he’s been ready since he realized Bucky was hard too or maybe Bucky’s just fucking _good_ with his tongue but regardless Steve finds himself tipping at the edge of his orgasm _fast_. He twitches his fingers in Bucky’s hair in warning, and Bucky slides down further still, engulfing him fully to swallow around him, and Steve lets his head fall back against the solid root of the hawthorn and gives himself over to it. It hits him not like the swift punch to the gut it sometimes is, but like a series of waves that break over him harder and harder until he’s shaking, until can’t keep his head above the surface anymore and simply has to let himself go under. 

He’s gasping through the last, quivering wave of it as Bucky pulls away, wiping the back of his hand over his mouth. His eyes are wide. 

“Okay?” He asks, absurdly, his voice hoarse. 

“ _Fuck_ ,” Steve says, eloquently. Then he lurches forward, dragging Bucky back upward and rolling them over so that he can press _Bucky_ down into the moss, kissing him roughly. 

He gets his hand between them, once again pressing at Bucky’s erection through the grey wool, and this time Bucky surges into it with a moan. 

“Can I?” Steve asks, desperate. 

Bucky nods frantically, and Steve makes short work of shoving his fly open and pulling Bucky free. He buries his face in Bucky’s neck, absently flicking out his tongue to taste the salt of his sweat as he jacks him hard and fast and without finesse. Bucky doesn’t seem to mind, teetering on the edge already with just a few erratic thrusts into Steve’s fist. He digs his nails into the small of Steve’s back until his mouth drops open on a gasp, going rigid under Steve as he comes between them. 

Steve collapses against him heavily, utterly spent, and Bucky is equally loose and pliant underneath him as their breathing slowly subsides. 

After a few more moments Steve sits up, groping for his t-shirt to wipe them both off. He buttons his pants as Bucky does the same, but bites the inside of his cheek as he glances at his sweater. He isn’t quite ready to re-dress, ready for Bucky to do as he always has done and send him back home…

“Can I—” he starts, 

“Don’t go—” Bucky says at the same time, reaching for him. 

Steve’s face breaks into a smile, and Bucky’s expression is an answering one of sunny relief as he opens his arms again to Steve. Steve does grab the sweater though, and balls it up into a makeshift pillow before Bucky stretches back out, placing it under his head. Then he curls himself up with his own head pillowed on Bucky’s shoulder, leaning back in to the soft warmth of his body. 

Bucky runs his hand through Steve’s hair, fingertips massaging gently at his scalp, and Steve can already feel sleep descending on him as he drifts on the sound of Bucky’s heartbeat under his. 

But he still hears, distantly, before it pulls him all the way under, Bucky whisper against the crown of his head, 

“I wouldn’t change any of it, Steve.”

Steve is awakened, disoriented, by the shrill voices of three baby blackbirds demanding breakfast.

It takes him a moment to realize it, groping for his cellphone automatically to stop the alarm that isn’t there. But his fingers close instead only on a handful of moss, and he remembers slowly where he is. 

He’s warm, even in the weak rays of dawn on his bare shoulders, and he blinks his eyes open and rolls over, hands reaching for Bucky. 

But he finds himself alone in the little hollow between the hawthorn roots. And when he sits up, it’s as if whatever bubble of magic he’d been sheltering in bursts, and he shivers immediately in the proper chill of a spring morning. He tugs his crumpled sweater on, and finds his discarded coat as well, wrapping his arms around himself and willing his teeth not to chatter. 

“Bucky?” He calls quietly into the misty clearing. There’s no answer besides an uptick in the squalling of the little birds in their nest far above his head. 

Steve frowns, running a hand through his disordered hair. 

The previous night comes back to him in pieces, and his face flushes hot as his eyes land on his dirty t-shirt. He hopes the reason for his waking up alone isn’t because Bucky regrets it, the line they’d crossed together. But Bucky had asked him to stay, after, he hadn’t imagined that…

But then he remembers the rest of the night, and all the many less pleasant things that had come before they…well, before they’d made each other come. 

The scene with the fae court replays itself for him, and then, even worse, the reasons Steve had returned to the faerie ring last night at all, and their argument yesterday afternoon. Steve’s brow furrows in worry as he searches again up through the branches of the hawthorn as if Bucky might just be hiding there. As he still doesn’t find him, it occurs to Steve that morning-after embarrassment is the least troubling of the possible reasons for Bucky’s absence right now. 

Steve hauls himself up, a little stiff—though not nearly as much as one would expect from a night spent sleeping on the ground. Should he wait here for Bucky? Or leave him be? Let him think things over before they have to talk about…about all the things they desperately need to talk about. 

He stands with one hand on the trunk of the hawthorn, torn with indecision. A beam of sun breaks into the clearing as he does, piercing between the branches of the nearest oak tree. 

A metallic glint catches Steve’s periphery, out of place in the misty woods. 

There’s a small hollow in the trunk of the hawthorn, around waist level on Steve. Just an opening about the size of Steve’s palm, shallow and filled with dried leaves. But on top of the leaves is the thing that caught the light—Steve leans forward to pluck it carefully from its spot. 

As soon as his fingers retrieve the object, the little hollow closes up and vanishes, replaced with smooth bark as if it were never there. Steve blinks at it sluggishly, still unaccustomed to the uncomfortable reality of magic happening in front of him, even after all he’s seen. 

He shakes his head and turns his attention to the thing in his hand, unclenching his fingers around the flat silver edges of it—and finds himself holding a set of dogtags. They’re remarkably clean for having spent any amount of time in the clutches of the tree, the metal shiny and unblemished, though the chain shows some little flecks of rust. He flicks one of the tags over with his thumb to make out the embossed lettering. 

_James B. Barnes_  
_12067589 T 42 43 A_  
_Winnifred Barnes_  
_1791 Brannon Street_  
_Brooklyn, NY 11233_

Steve isn’t familiar enough with military stuff to know what the numbers mean. But the address is distantly familiar. He frowns. Brannon Street…he thinks he knows the one, though there aren’t any homes on it that he can remember. 

James Barnes. He turns the name over in his mind. Hadn’t Natasha—had she called Bucky “James”? 

_I was human, once_. Bucky had said. _Before this, I was a person_. 

Steve’s fist closes tight around the dogtags with a sharp breath. He eyes the spot in the bark of the tree where the hollow had disappeared, now indistinguishable from the rest. The magic in this ring, and surrounding the hawthorn specifically, has until now been entirely Bucky’s domain. If the tree produced these for Steve…he thinks it stands to reason that it has to do with Bucky as well. 

Maybe everything to do with him. 

He wonders if Bucky left them for him to discover on purpose. Maybe he didn’t know how to say what needed to be said this morning in the light of day and instead—instead is going to let Steve figure it out himself. 

He wishes he could ask if that’s what Bucky wants. But there’s still no sign of him as the sun climbs higher in the sky, and dawn truly becomes day. 

Steve clenches his jaw in indecision one last time, and then nods to himself. 

He loops the chain around his neck. The chilled metal of the tags settles against his chest beneath his sweater, and he presses his palm over them to hold them still against his skin as he makes his way back out into the new morning sun. 

***


	8. Eight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter Eight, or: Who the Hell is Bucky?

He goes back to his flat first, out of habit more than anything else.

But as soon as he’s inside the door Steve realizes several things in quick succession. 

First, he knows before he even attempts to open his laptop that he’s out of his research element here. He’s not particularly good at this type of internet investigation. Sam has always been the one who could instantly track down someone’s email address or instagram account or whatever it might be that he wanted to find. But he can’t ask Sam to help him with this—it would take way too much explanation, especially considering his uncertainty about what the search is going to turn up. It might be unsettling, and it’s definitely important, and he doesn’t trust himself to think on his feet depending on how much of either it proves to be. So instead he looks up the hours for the local library. 

Second, after determining that they’ll be open within the hour, he realizes he’d better get himself in some kind of civilized shape before leaving the house again or people are going to worry about his sanity. He finds several leaves clinging to his hair, and a smudge of mud or rotten bark down the side of his jeans. He looks _exactly_ like someone who spent the night in the woods, with the added bonus of also smelling like he got fucked while doing it. 

So Steve rushes himself through a slapdash shower, barely long enough to let the hot water drive off the chill of his early morning traipse through the forest, and into a clean set of clothes. 

As soon as he looks in the mirror over his bathroom sink he realizes that the shirt he’s put on isn’t going to work. His skin is livid purple at the neckline, the bruising creeping toward his ear. It’s entirely too easy to tell the mark for exactly what it is—evidence of teeth and tongue and passion, vigorously applied. Steve presses his thumb against it and lets out a not entirely unpleasurable hiss at the sensation. Then he changes the shirt for a sweater with a thicker collar. 

He gives himself another critical once-over as he brushes his teeth and determines that he at least looks like a semi-respectable adult, even if the expression on his face is still a little too wild-eyed for perfect sanity. He wonders if he should take the time to shave the rough two-day growth of stubble he’s sporting, but decides he can’t be bothered. 

The little town is fully in the throes of waking up and going about its day as Steve’s feet hit the cobblestone street outside his flat. He notices with some trepidation that the construction site is already humming with workers as he passes, and he picks up his pace, weaving around a pack of uniformed students on their way to school. 

By the time he reaches the library his hands are shaking—and he remembers that he hasn’t had anything to eat in many hours. Steve glances at the large double doors set back in the stone facade of the old building, anxious to get down to business. He puts his hand again to his chest, where the dogtags hang hidden, warm from his skin. But then he considers the possibility of fainting in the middle of a library at eight thirty in the morning on a Tuesday and decides he’d rather not. 

He veers instead into the little cafe next door and orders the largest cup of coffee they serve, and two muffins. He tries to ignore that the little old woman behind the counter is watching him with concern as he scarfs them down, barely taking time to pretend to sit at one of the rickety tables long enough to wash them down with a few gulps of burning hot coffee. 

“Have a nice day, dear,” she says, a little bemused as Steve heads again for the door. His ears go pink immediately, and he mutters his thanks as best he can before fleeing. 

Steve takes a few deep breaths and another slug of coffee to psych himself up before entering the library. He _really_ hopes he isn’t the first or only person here, but doesn’t expect much luck on that front at this hour of the day. _Find a librarian, be casual_. That’s all he has to do. 

The library is cool and dim inside, thanks to being located in an extremely old stone building with very few windows. And it’s full of the comforting, musty smell of books. Steve’s even pleased to find that there are a few scattered groups of high school students and a couple of pairs of older patrons already seated in the mismatched collection of chairs and tables he can see. It helps calm him a little. _Stop acting like a crazy person and you’ll probably look less like one too_ , he tells himself one last time, settling his shoulders. 

He does his best to look nonchalant as he looks for the help desk. But his heart sinks a little when he finds it. He’d unconsciously been expecting to ask for help from the kind of stern but motherly type in a sweater set one would imagine staffing a library in the British countryside. 

Instead he finds an entirely too hip-looking young woman, maybe only a few years out school, clacking away at the computer behind the desk industriously. Her dark curls are styled in an artistically asymmetrical cut, and he can see no less than three earrings in each of her ears, as well as the hoop in her nose. Steve is absolutely certain that he _cannot_ ask for her to help him with this—like he’s some old man who can’t use the google. He groans internally—he is an old man who can’t use the google! _And_ is terrified of a cool young person seeing right through him— _fuck_ confronting internal biases, he wants the comforting detachment of a grey-haired spinster! _Oh god, too late_. His internal spiral is cut short when the girl looks up and sees him hovering, and smiles in a friendly, professional sort of way. 

“Can I help you find something?” She asks, folding her hands on top of the desk. She’s wearing a lot of rings, and Steve’s momentarily distracted looking at them. 

“Uh—no—I mean, yeah, maybe?” He manages to stutter, feeling his entire face go bright pink. He wishes _he_ had magic at his disposal right at this moment, and could make the floor swallow him in some kind of sinkhole situation. 

She raises her eyebrows slightly, and Steve wants to die. 

“Have you been in before? Don’t think I’ve seen you. We don’t get a lot of tourists in.” 

“Tour—? Oh, right,” Steve says, stepping closer if only so that his flailings won’t be observed by every other occupant of the library. He forgot his accent is a giant neon sign above his head the moment he opens his mouth, marking him as out of place even when he’s not acting shifty as hell. “I’m actually, um—here for work. In town.” 

“Oh brilliant,” the girl says brightly, bypassing his awkwardness with remarkable fortitude. “Research question maybe?” 

Steve sighs, and takes the last step closing the distance between him and the desk, giving in to the machinations of fate. “Yeah I—” he clears his throat. “I found something on a uh—job site. And I wanted to see if I could find out anything about it.” He lifts the chain with the tags over his head self-consciously, placing them on the polished wood of the desk. “I don’t really know where to start—” he blushes again, and says in a rush “I mean, I guess I could have probably googled it first but I was hoping maybe you’d be able to help with some more official records, or uh—anything like that.” 

The girl hums, already examining the dogtags with interest, and not seeming to find the request odd, for which Steve is deeply grateful. 

“Okay yeah, of course. I mean these are American, as you can see, obviously,” she says, “but see this notch here?” She holds one of the tags up, showing Steve what she means with her thumbnail. He nods, and she smiles. 

“That’s a pretty good bet they were printed before the 60’s.” She looks up at him again, looking more curious now. “You said you found them ‘round here?” Steve bites his cheek and nods again. “Interesting. Well then, you know we were a staging ground for American troops ahead of D-Day, yeah? God they’re in great shape though to be from the forties aren’t they?” 

The question sounds rhetorical to Steve, as the girl is looking thoughtfully at the tags and not him. But he’s too surprised not to respond anyway, “The _forties_? You think they’re that—that old?” 

_It’s impossible_ , says one voice in his head. 

_Isn’t everything about Bucky is impossible?_ Asks another. 

She shrugs, closing the tags in her hand and rising from her chair. “Not sure. But we can have a look at the archives if you like.” She shoots him a suppressed smile. “And if that doesn’t do the trick then yeah, we can take a shot at some googling.” 

“Thanks.” He trails her as she moves from behind the desk to cross the library, feeling a bit like a puppy. 

“Sarah,” she says, slowing down so that he can fall into step beside her. He nearly stumbles at the name. 

“Steve,” he manages, weakly. 

Sarah gives a small laugh, and waves her shiny, ring-filled hand at an ancient looking computer station tucked into a stone nook between rows of bookshelves. “Right then Steve, let’s have a look and see what we can get for you.” 

She seats herself in the worn chair, leaving Steve hovering behind her as she sets the dogtags face up beside the mouse and starts the computer booting up. 

“It’ll take a minute, this thing is old as dirt,” she says, half turning in the chair as the computer starts making a concerning kind of whirring noise. 

“Sorry,” Steve says, stuffing his hands in his pockets. “You could—I mean if you just want to tell me how it works you don’t have to—I don’t want to bother you too much.” 

Sarah laughs again, and Steve thinks he would prefer the angry shushing which is normally what he expects as his only interaction with librarians. 

“Look Steve, I’m not blowing smoke up your ass here when I say this is the most interesting possible thing that I could be doing at nine a.m. on a Tuesday, so seriously don’t mention it.” She jerks her thumb over her shoulder, “Before you came in all I had going was telling Harry Crawford for the eight thousandth time that I don’t get paid to write his book reports for him. So how about you relax and let me have a little fun with an excuse to dabble in the archives, right?” 

Steve takes a deep, get-your-shit-together breath. This girl—Sarah—is being very nice and professional and helping him with exactly what he needed. And she has a familiarly blunt, can-do quality about her that reminds him of Peggy. He lets out a huff, and smiles for real this time. 

“Thank you. I have no idea what I’m doing.” 

“Yeah,” she agrees, turning back to the now bright white screen of the computer, “well it’s your luck I do.”

In the end, Sarah-the-Librarian leaves Steve tucked into a worn carrel desk with several sheafs of paper spread in front of him, and forced to consider what Sarah-his-Mother would say if she were here now to comment.

Sarah-the-Librarian’s researching skills _are_ formidable, as it turns out. And after two hours of dedicated searching, switching between databases, and several trips into the stacks including one to the actual physical basement archive of the library, she leaves him with everything he could have hoped to find based on a single set of dogtags. 

She doesn’t realize, of course, as she bids him good luck with his project and returns to the main desk looking satisfied with her efforts, that she’s handed over a kind of emotional incendiary device set on a short fuse. 

Which brings Steve to Sarah-his-Mother and how much he wishes he could talk to her right now. She’s the only person he can think of who he could go to with any of this who he thinks would have believed him—helped him, even, to comprehend just what he’s gotten himself into. 

His heart aches for her as much as it does for James Buchanan Barnes—paratrooper, sergeant, deceased. _Bucky_. 

It’s almost comforting to Steve to learn that Bucky was just as impossibly handsome when he was alive. 

Spread out in front of Steve is an odd patchwork of photocopied pages, some printed from online and others scanned on the library copy machine for him, altogether making up an impressionist painting of a life. If he leans back far enough he thinks he can just make out the entire picture—but he keeps getting distracted wrapping his head around the details. 

Details such as a birth announcement: 

_A son, James Buchanan Barnes, born to Mr. and Mrs. George Barnes on March 10th 1917. Mrs. Barnes was, before her marriage, Miss Winnifred Hamilton of Queens. Baby James is welcomed also by an older sister, Rebecca, aged fourteen months._

Then there’s an obituary for George Barnes, a sparse announcement of his passing ten years after Bucky’s—after _James’_ —birth. And then a photograph accompanying the marriage notice of his sister Rebecca Barnes eight years later. 

Beside that is the piece that continues to draw Steve’s eye, even as he attempts to take it all in. 

It’s the public service record of James Buchanan Barnes. And the information may be scant enough—but it’s accompanied by a photograph, his official portrait in his dress uniform on the occasion of his graduation from basic training. 

It’s Bucky’s face staring up at him in grainy black and white. On that point there is no room for doubt in Steve’s mind. Which just makes the rest of it harder for him to grasp, because he _has_ to grasp it. He can’t explain it away as a family resemblance. There’s just no mistaking him, and it couldn’t be anyone else. His hat is perched at a rakish angle over his brow, lips quirked in a soft smirk. Steve thinks he can almost guess the exact blue-green shade of his eyes even in the hazy print. 

Beneath the photo is a brief summary of Sergeant James B. Barnes’ service with the United States Army Airborne Corps, 1942-1944. 

Most of it is generic enough that Steve doesn’t spend too much time trying to parse it. But at the bottom of the half-sheet are two pieces of information that set his head spinning. 

That his last duty station was here in this very town, part of the Allied troops mustering for the invasion of Normandy. 

And that several weeks ahead of the invasion, Sergeant Barnes went Absent Without Leave. When he could not be found, and lacking any evidence to the contrary, he was eventually listed as a deserter—discharged dishonorably from his service. 

There’s an obituary from a Brooklyn newspaper a few years later. It’s light on details, but simply says that James Barnes went missing and is presumed dead by his family, survived by his mother and sister. 

_James “Bucky” Barnes, beloved son and brother—our brave boy._

It makes Steve feel deeply sad, imagining them wondering—told that their son and brother had run away but clearly never believing it. And passing away, both of them, without ever knowing for sure what had happened. 

Steve’s slumps back in his chair, running his hands over his face. 

_He’s_ certainly not sure what happened either. But it’s obvious that whatever it was went far beyond the assumptions of the impersonal typewritten discharge papers. 

He wonders what happened to the bright-eyed young man in this photograph between a troop camp in 1944 and the mercurial fae creature Steve encountered only a week ago who wears the same face. 

More forcefully, he wonders what happened to _himself_ in the space of that week since he’d looked up and found Bucky perched, naked among the branches and the man Steve thinks now he’s come to know. Because somewhere along the line he’d stopped thinking of Bucky as the dryad he’d introduced himself as, and started thinking of him as a person. And somehow despite all the odds, it makes perfect sense to him that Bucky _is_ a person with a mother and a father and a sister and a home that was once eerily close to Steve’s own. 

It makes perfect sense and absolutely no sense at all. 

What was he meant to glean from this, when the tree had offered up the tags? Steve’s still not sure. 

He supposes there’s only one way to find out—and that’s to return, once again, to the place that seems to hold such power over both of them and ask Bucky himself. 

He shuffles the pages into the blank manila folder Sarah had kindly provided him, thoughts dark and clouded with unanswered trails of questions unraveling in a hundred different directions like a scattered basket of yarn through his mind. The more he pulls on any one of them, the more it seems to tumble away from him uselessly. 

Steve blames his preoccupation with the file in his hand for the fact that he doesn’t notice the other person on the sidewalk until he practically collides with them. And that he doesn’t recognize that he also knows them until after stumbling sideways off the curb to avoid the collision. 

“Steve! Are you alright?” Peggy asks, grasping at his elbow as Steve regains his balance and makes sure he doesn’t scatter the strange, incriminating pages of research from the folder while he’s at it. 

“Oh, Peg! I wasn’t—sorry, I didn’t—yeah I’m good,” he fumbles, guiltily, clutching the manila folder tightly down by his side. 

Peggy raises her eyebrows, her gaze going at once to his hand like it’s drawn by the force of how much he _doesn’t_ want her to ask about it. 

“You’re coming from town?” She asks, eyes flicking back up the way Steve had come. 

“Oh, yeah. Just um, had to make some copies at the library, couple of things I wanted to…look up.” 

“Mmm,” she says. “Right, I always forget how thorough you are. I took a look at what you’ve uploaded so far though and it all looks like it’s in good order—seems like you ought to be pretty close to finished?” 

Oh god, the report. Steve groans internally, feeling a bubble of panic swelling in his chest. “I—may have hit a snag, actually. Not sure it’s ready yet. I’ll—I’ll let you know.” 

“Ah well, as long as you aren’t too fussed about crossing t’s and dotting i’s that don’t need it. But snags abound with this bloody thing,” she says, seeming to accept his words at face value. 

She turns back to the doorway she’d been coming out of—the entrance to her current offices, Steve realizes belatedly—and finishes locking the door. 

“Where are you off to?” He asks. 

Peggy heaves a beleaguered sigh, and brandishes her own file folder at him. “Off to update my police report, I’m sorry to say.” She frowns at his look of confusion. “Guessing you didn’t see the new work of our graffitist this morning then?” 

Steve swallows and shakes his head. “No—same spot?” 

Peggy shrugs and offers him the file. “And a few others. Seems they’re not letting up. And the police are fairly unwilling to do much more than the usual rounds so I’m not optimistic of them getting caught any time soon. But the squeaky wheel gets the grease I suppose, so I’m going to continue pestering them about it at least.” 

Steve slides the folder over the top of his own, flipping the cover open. Inside he sees that Peggy’s printed out photographs of each instance of vandalism from various angles of the construction site. It looks like there have been several new applications of the initial, chilling message: _Who spilt the blood in Brightneau Wood?_ across some of the new walls, including inside one of the fully framed buildings. 

Steve flips through a few pictures of scattered equipment, eyes skimming perfunctorily. 

But he stops flipping, spine going cold, at a picture of other words scrawled on the stone slab of the newest site at the edge of the meadow in bright red paint. 

_Here lies a soldier, bloodied and buried._

“…all rather macabre, and I’m inclined to think Angie might be right after all and some student was a little too enthralled with their Poe readings,” Peggy is saying, when the droning sound in Steve’s ears clears enough to hear her. “Steve, are you sure you’re alright? You look a bit peaky.” 

Steve snaps his mouth shut when he realizes it’s open as he stares at the words in the photo, his free hand creeping up unconsciously to press at the dogtags against his chest. 

“I’m okay,” he says, feeling like his mouth isn’t entirely connected to his brain. “Just—a touch of allergies or something. Didn’t sleep well. Hey listen, I have to go—” he closes the folder and hands it back to her, trying to brush past the look of concern on her face. “I’m sure—I’m sure the police’ll catch the kid eventually, or they’ll run out of steam.” 

He’s sure of no such thing, and he’s surprised at the ease with which the lie falls off his tongue. 

The police and Peggy are both out of their depth here, right along with Steve. They’re as unlikely to catch their vandal as they are to stop the out of season flooding, unnaturally quick rot, and unexpectedly shifting earth. Which is to say that they won’t—because it’s _Bucky_ , all of it, and he has magic on his side. 

It’s so obvious. Now that he thinks about it Steve’s astounded he didn’t put the pieces together before. 

_You don’t know even now the ways you thwart each other_ , Natasha had said. She’d called it a battle line and Steve hadn’t understood. If he’d thought anything it had been that the pronouncement was about the divide between their stations—the human world and the fae one Bucky inhabits. Now he realizes it was about something much more pressing and pragmatic than that—if this project is the line, Steve isn’t simply a passive participant but an active soldier in the trenches working to push it forward. 

“I—I should go, Pegs—” he says, trying for a smile and knowing as soon as he does that it doesn’t come off right. It feels strained, and Peggy’s sharp eyes are keen on his face again. 

“Come to dinner tonight?” She asks. 

“Oh, tonight? I’m—I think I’ll be working pretty late,” Steve grasps for a casual tone. “Hit a snag, like I said, probably oughta…” he trails off awkwardly. 

Peggy nods. “Tomorrow then. We’ll do the pub again, Angie’s been in London this weekend and I doubt any of us will want to cook. See you at the usual.” It’s not a request, and Steve hears the command in it, knows if he pushes it he’ll have to offer up something more in the way of an explanation. And he’s not prepared to do that. 

“Tomorrow, yeah—yeah that’s better. Great.” 

“Mmm,” Peggy says. “Don’t be late.” 

“No, I promise,” Steve agrees, nodding his head emphatically, intent on his imminent escape. 

He darts in and kisses Peggy on the cheek, spinning oh his heel to make a hasty retreat before she can come up with another reason to delay him, or decides to put him to a more straightforward line of questioning which he isn’t in any shape to dodge gracefully. 

“Don’t work too hard!” She calls after him, and Steve raises a hand in a wave of acknowledgment without looking back. 

He should probably do some thinking about _that_ before tomorrow night. He has no doubt Peggy’s going to spend the next thirty-six hours strategizing a line of—loving, concerned—attack before then. Maybe he can refine his story about the delay in the report while he’s at it, buy himself some time and kill two birds with one stone. He shakes his head, sighing. He’s never been a very skilled liar—but needs must. Unless he’s willing to come clean about everything, which he’s definitely even less prepared to do than lie. 

Steve’s steps slow and eventually halt as he pulls alongside the construction site. There’s a dozen men in orange vests and helmets going about their business in the different corners of the building. But his eyes focus in on one in particular, and the loud drone of the power washer he’s directing at the stone slab. 

Red paint diluted into faint pink water runs over the edges, seeping into the dirt below. Bucky’s words—his chosen epitaph, or his warning, maybe—washing away into nothing. 

Steve considers, now that he’s standing still, whether he should take a moment to think this through. What exactly he’s doing here, and what his actions mean. 

Things have shifted. He’d thought last night how in the faerie tales his mom used to tell him, it was always the humans who had to ante up the stakes for whatever game the Fair Folk decided they’d like to play. But this doesn’t feel like a game. It seems like Bucky has as much or more to lose than he does in the outcome. 

And as for Steve’s stakes? They remain unclear. But things had shifted before now, before he knew that whatever he was getting himself into had ramifications for his _real_ life. The distinction between his real life and the world inside Bucky’s faerie ring had vanished when they’d stood side by side in defiance of the fae. And again when he’d felt Bucky’s skin against his in the quiet bubble of a mossy bed. 

It isn’t in Steve’s nature to deny the reality of what he feels in his bones. 

It’s not in his nature either to second guess himself when he knows something to be true. 

Whatever comes next and whatever Bucky meant for Steve to do with the knowledge of his past, they’ll face the consequences of it side by side too. He still doesn’t know all the rules, but he refuses to move across the board in mincing steps like a pawn when all his life he’s attacked it like a knight. And Bucky, the vibrant spirit he’s come to know, is no pawn either. Which means no matter what is arrayed against them, they’ll have better odds facing it together. 

Steve turns his eyes from the wash of red paint and gives in to the inexorable pull of Brightneau. 

***


	9. Nine

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Things are, as you can imagine, soon to become complicated.

Bucky is pacing back and forth under the spreading branches of the hawthorn as Steve emerges from the edge of the wood.

His face turns toward Steve as soon as he crosses the ring, expression melting instantly when he sees him. 

He’s wearing the same sort of clothes he had been last night—and now the odd old-fashioned style of them makes perfect sense to Steve. 

“Steve,” he says, stopping his track beneath the tree. “Thank goodness—” 

Steve’s whole body lights up at Bucky’s voice, sparking through his chest, and he closes the distance between them in a few quick strides to pull Bucky tight against him. Bucky’s arms close around his neck, and the rest of his sentence turns into a long sigh that ruffles Steve’s hair. 

There’s so much to say, still, and Steve vows not to let himself get _entirely_ diverted from the necessity of it. But first, just for a moment…

He walks Bucky backwards until his back is at the trunk of the hawthorn, pressing him up against it with his body before kissing him hard. Bucky lets out a little _mmph_ of surprise, but then he’s kissing back, and hitching one of his knees around Steve’s leg. His fingertips slide down the side of Steve’s neck, brushing along the bruise he’d made and sending another shiver of sparks down Steve’s spine with yearning for him to do it again. If they had time, he’d let Bucky mark up every inch of him but—he pulls back, breathing heavily, and tries to collect himself. 

Bucky looks at him from under heavy eyelids, a smile curving his mouth. 

“Hi,” Bucky says, with a hint of a husky laugh in his voice. 

Steve huffs a laugh of his own, dropping his forehead to Bucky’s shoulder. 

“You were gone this morning,” he says. 

“I know, I’m sorry.” Bucky runs his fingertips through the short hair at Steve’s nape. 

“We need to talk about—about everything.” 

“Yeah.” 

Steve takes in a deep, settling breath, pulling back again to look at him. 

Bucky’s bottom lip is between his teeth, and Steve can’t help but lick his own, unconsciously. Bucky’s eyes drop at once to the motion. 

“ _Fuck_ ,” he says, and drags Steve in again by the back of his neck to kiss him breathless. Bucky’s lips are intoxicating, and despite his best intentions Steve loses himself for several long moments exploring his mouth all over again. It’s even better, now that he knows what that mouth is capable of and he—

He breaks away again with a gasp. “Buck—we gotta—”

Bucky groans, and the sound does even more distracting things to Steve’s body, but he shakes his head forcefully. He steps back out of Bucky’s arms to catch his breath. 

“Yeah,” Bucky sighs, and pushes him a little further, straightening his arm braced against Steve’s chest. “This is better maybe. For talking.” 

Steve takes one more step back so that they aren’t touching, hating every inch of space between them. Bucky reaches up and touches his own mouth with his fingertips thoughtfully, and Steve swallows hard and looks down at the ground instead. 

“What happened to you, Bucky? How did you—how did you become this?” 

Steve looks up again to see Bucky frown, brow furrowing. “I told you I—I don’t remember.” 

“You were in the troop camp in town,” Steve says, gently, “did you—did the fae take you? Trick you, maybe?” 

Bucky frowns harder. “Troop camp?” 

Steve nods. “I found the tags—from the tree, when I woke up this morning, that you left for me—”

“I don’t know what you’re _talking about_ Steve,” Bucky says, almost angrily, “what tags? What camp?” 

Steve starts back, surprised, unsure of what’s happening right now. He reaches into the neck of his sweater and pulls the chain off over his head, holding them out to hang, glinting in the sun, in the space between them. Bucky shakes his head a little, and it looks like he would lean away further from them if the tree weren’t at his back. Steve just leaves them suspended there, swaying on the chain. 

“The dogtags— _your_ dogtags.”

Bucky’s face goes slack, but his gaze sharpens into laserlike focus on the silver tags between them. 

“You didn’t—didn’t you leave them for me to find? In the tree?” 

Bucky shakes his head again, minutely, mouth slightly open. Slowly, he lifts his hand to reach out between them, shaking a little, for the tags. The chain slips from Steve’s hand as Bucky takes them. 

But the moment his fingers close around them, Steve knows it was a mistake. Bucky’s fist clenches, and his eyes snap shut with a cry of pain, hands going to his ribcage as he staggers forward away from the tree. 

“Bucky!” Steve reaches for him, and Bucky stumbles another step sideways with an anguished gasp. 

“Steve—don’t—”

It’s too late. Steve’s hands close on Bucky’s shoulders, thinking to pull him into his arms. 

A searing pain tears between his ribs, and fire between his shoulder blades. He sways with it in agony, but manages to look up to meet Bucky’s eyes. 

“I’m sorry,” Bucky’s lips move over the words without any sound. 

Or maybe he does speak them, but Steve can’t hear over the roaring in his ears. 

He blinks, twice, the clearing around them growing fainter each time they close, even as he tries to keep Bucky in his sights. 

Then it disappears entirely.

_A young soldier pauses in the dark lane, leaning against the low earthwork wall beside the hedgerow. The flare of his lighter briefly illuminates his face, despite his hand cupped around the flame attempting to block it._

 _Bucky. Some small corner of Steve’s brain that isn’t consumed by the vision recognizes him, floating above the scene._

_The soldier walks somewhere between a stroll and a marching pace down the deserted road. His footsteps are the only sound in the muffling fog for several more minutes._

_In the utter silence, he turns at the sound of a voice speaking low and muffled from the trees._

_Steve watches Bucky hesitate, listening again for the voice. He feels an impending sense of dread as he watches Bucky stub out his cigarette, willing him silently not to do what he’s sure he’s about to do—but still Bucky climbs quietly over the wall, drawing Steve with him between the trees._

_Bucky creeps through the tangle of trees toward the voices, every line of his body alert. He pulls a small clicker from his pocket, and clicks it twice, head cocked for a response that doesn’t come. He edges closer, until both he and Steve can hear the voices—a man and a woman arguing in German._

_Steve stops listening to the conversation, although Bucky stays intent on it, hunched forward, straining to hear. Steve struggles for a voice to warn him, for hands to pull him back from whatever is about to happen. But he doesn’t have either one—just eyes to watch it unfold._

_Bucky wavers for another moment at the edge of the scene before rising to retreat, and Steve screams silently for him to run. A branch cracks behind him with the heavy footfall of a third conspirator approaching. Bucky half turns, hand going to his sidearm but—_

_Steve watches the knife plunge into Bucky’s back, and suddenly his awareness is halved and he also is Bucky. A white hot, searing pain catches fire below his left shoulder blade, pinning him to the spot as it blossoms and flares across his senses, blinding him. Steve lets out another voiceless cry of agony, though Bucky’s lips are silent as he turns to face his attacker._

_And Steve can see the face of Bucky’s murderer clearly because he’s Bucky but he also isn’t, and thinks he might also be the knife as he feels Bucky’s skin and muscle parting for him and the thrum of Bucky’s blood flooding hot and fast to the new opening in his flesh as it lodges in between his ribs._

_Bucky’s hands come up to replace his killer’s on the hilt of the knife, holding it in place. He stumbles back, unseeing—but Steve does see, with bright clarity, where his feet land. The rest of the scene—the spies and the dark forest—dim as Bucky’s steps send him over the edge of the mushroom ring, flaring briefly with the light of magic in Steve’s vision._

_Bucky makes it a few paces further into the clearing inside the faerie ring before collapsing around the knife, falling at the foot of a small hawthorn sapling._

_And then the pain recedes, and Steve knows that Bucky is dying._

_He’s bleeding his life out into the loamy earth of the faerie circle, and Steve is helpless to do anything but watch as he takes a few, final breaths, his blood speckling his lips with pink foam._

_Steve lets out a silent sob when the pain vanishes entirely, and with it the last bit of light in Bucky’s eyes._

_He would be shaking, if he had any substance to do so. Steve tries to look away from the empty shell of Bucky’s now lifeless form, willing the vision to release him now that it’s over._

_But it isn’t over yet. For several long moments he simply hovers there, watching Bucky’s blood seep into the dirt at the foot of the sapling._

_Then, as he watches, the ring of mushrooms flares again with that eerie, incandescent light. Tendrils of it creep in, swirling around the circle until it reaches the center—surrounding Bucky’s body. As it does, his form glows bright—once—and then dissolves entirely into the seething mass of golden light._

_The magic clears, and Bucky’s body is gone._

_It’s the hawthorn which moves now, twisting and swelling, unfurling new branches and stretching tall—a hundred years of growth in the blink of Steve’s metaphorical eyes. At last, high in the tree, the trunk splits one more time into two, creating the wide fork where Steve remembers, distantly, that he once sat with Bucky, telling each other jokes. It splits, and curled in the flat opening of it is Bucky._

_He had been a person—and now he is something else._

_Time curves over on itself, like a bubble swelling around the ring, and it flows past Steve like a river—catching momentarily here and there on a moment like water breaking around a rock in the stream._

_He sees the men who had been part of the group of three spies return in confusion to where they had left Bucky’s body, shovels hanging uselessly in their hands as they argue between themselves._

_He sees the fae come to meet the newest citizen of their woods, and how Bucky shies away from them._

_He sees Bucky learning to wield his magic and make things grow around him._

_And he sees how Bucky forgets, slowly, about what had come before, and he walks more freely among the Fair Folk and laughs at the humans who stumble across his path with little recognition and even less sympathy._

_He feels as Bucky feels the earth tremble when it’s broken at the edge of the meadow by men in orange vests. And he is beside Bucky as he walks through the construction site in the moonlight, eyes obsidian black as he sends water to flood it, rotting piles of wood, flashing his hand until letters appear on the walls in dripping paint._

_Steve watches all of it in little stolen glimpses—seventy years of time and magic._

_At last, the stream of time slows and halts around Bucky, curled again listlessly in the fork of the tree. He lifts his head at a new sound. From far below, Steve hears a voice that he recognizes distantly as his own say, “I’ll be back.”_

_Bucky lays his head back down on the crook of his arm, and his mouth curves in a mischievous smile._

Steve opens his eyes in his own body, and for a moment the sheer physicality of being contained again in flesh and bone makes his stomach heave as he readjusts from being nothing.

His heart shudders forward sickeningly in little erratic starts. 

When he can focus on something other than the exact location of every nerve ending he possesses, he finds that he and Bucky both collapsed to the ground at some point during the vision. Bucky is crumpled half underneath him, his arms clasped around himself as he shakes through his own aftermath. 

Seeing the tears and pain still etched on Bucky’s face is enough to jar Steve from his own suffering though, and he takes command of his limbs by force to rearrange himself around Bucky’s curled figure, holding him close. 

Bucky’s breath comes in heaving gasps, occasionally punctuated by a helpless little sob that seems to be wrenched from him involuntarily. Steve holds him tightly around the waist with one arm, and runs the other in a soothing circuit through his hair, over his creased forehead, and up and down his arm. It helps, focusing on comforting Bucky, and he finds himself soothed a little, at least, in the process as well. 

Finally Bucky gives a hiccuping sigh and sits up, twisting in Steve’s arms to rub at his eyes roughly. Steve sits up too beside him, both of them drawing up their knees to rest their backs against the latticework of roots and moss behind them. Somewhere along the line they’d come to rest again in the little hollow among the roots of the hawthorn. At eye level, Steve can look out across the grass of the clearing, dotted with wildflowers, and the russet red mushrooms of the ring beyond. 

Bucky’s forehead is resting on his arms, crossed over the tops of his knees. He tips his head sideways to look at Steve, his eyes puffy. 

“Did you…did you see it too? All of it?” He asks, voice rasping. 

Steve nods, hesitating a moment before slipping his arm around Bucky’s shoulders. 

“I’m sorry,” he says, “I didn’t—I had no idea that was going to happen. I thought you left the tags for me to find. I thought you knew.” 

Bucky leans into his chest heavily, and Steve rests his cheek on top of Bucky’s hair.

“You couldn’t know, it’s not your fault. But I’m glad you saw too.” 

“Bucky I—I’m sorry. For what happened to you.” 

Bucky pulls back enough so that they can look at one another, his eyes searching Steve’s face. 

“Thanks.” He chews on his bottom lip. “It’s good—to remember. Remember who I was before. But…” he lifts glistening eyes to Steve again. “I’m not sorry for all of it. I’m not sorry I met you.”

“Buck, god I—”

Bucky shakes his head, cutting him off. “I was prepared to die, Steve—I knew what my odds were, getting ready for the big jump. I probably would’ve, in France maybe. Just came at me by surprise a few weeks ahead of schedule. And I got to have this. For a little.” He makes a frustrated noise, and tugs at his hair. “But you know more about it than I do now. Did you—what’d they tell my ma? That I deserted?” 

Steve’s stomach clenches into an ugly knot. “Yeah.” He squeezes his arm tighter around Bucky’s shoulders as Bucky ducks his head. “But she didn’t believe them. Or your sister. They knew you—that you didn’t—that something wasn’t right. They knew.” 

Bucky nods, jaw clenching. “That’s good. Was Becca—did her husband come through? Was she happy?” 

Steve considers what little information he’d gleaned about Rebecca Barnes’ life after the war, and whether it’s enough to make that assessment. He thinks it is. 

“Yeah he came through. And she was. I think. Had a few kids. I think you’ve probably got a few grand-nieces and nephews still kicking around New York.” He drops his face in closer, pressing a quick kiss to Bucky’s temple. “I’m sorry, I should’ve found out more about that…about them. I got kinda distracted once I figured out who you were then and I—I just needed to see you.” 

Bucky chuckles weakly. “No that’s—that’s great. I’m glad of it.” 

“You know we grew up like six blocks away from each other?” 

Bucky smiles at that, almost a full one. “No shit? Six blocks and what, sixty years? How ‘bout that huh?” 

Steve smiles too, at the absurdity of it. “Yeah.” 

Bucky’s expression goes soft, looking at Steve for a long moment, and then he tilts his head in to brush his lips under Steve’s ear, at the hinge of his jaw. 

“Were you, um—” Steve begins, mouth forming a question that is arguably one of the least important on the list of ones he means to ask, “I mean—this—you and me—was it like that, for you back then too, or—?” 

Bucky raises an ironical eyebrow at him, mouth quirking. “Oh I became gay in 1972 when it was invented—can’t be fey without being fae first right?” 

Steve snorts in surprised laughter, and Bucky laughs too before elbowing him in the ribs. 

“You’re a dope. Yeah, I liked guys in the forties too, contrary to popular belief we did exist then as well. Honestly, every new crop of humans think they invented living or something, such a short memory.” He turns a sly look at Steve, hand slipping down his chest to toy at the cabling on his sweater. “I know I didn’t suck your cock like it was my first one—what’d you think I meant when I said it’d been a while? Thought that was part of the training course the Fae Court hands out when you join up?” 

Steve’s face flushes, heat spreading down his chest to where Bucky’s fingers are tracing little patterns there, playing with him. “I um—I didn’t think that hard about it—it was before I found out about when you were you and I uh—wasn’t exactly thinking all that clearly at the time anyway…” 

“That right?” Bucky whispers into his ear, eliciting a shiver. “You find my mouth distracting, Rogers?” 

“Uh-huh,” Steve agrees, very coherently. “Guess I must.” 

Bucky slips his hand up under Steve’s sweater, ghosting his fingers across Steve’s bare stomach. 

“That’s flattering, honestly. A guy worries about losing his touch.” 

Steve is pretty sure this isn’t the moment for this—again. He scolds himself. _Questions, Steve! Important questions that need answers!_ But he’s hard-pressed fighting against the urge to sprawl his body out flat and let Bucky have his way with him despite it all. 

Bucky smirks, and continues tracing the lines of Steve’s abs and the cut lines of his hips, looking like he knows _exactly_ what kind of internal debate it’s inspiring. 

Steve’s never been one to back down from a challenge. He holds Bucky’s eyes as he wraps his hand around his wrist, pulling Bucky’s out from under his shirt and up to his lips. Then he lets his eyes drop closed as he sucks two of Bucky’s fingers into his mouth, relishing Bucky’s little gasp of surprised pleasure. He works his tongue gingerly over and between them, grazing his teeth over Bucky’s knuckles before pulling them out slowly, lips lingering over the pads of his fingertips. He drops a kiss in the center of Bucky’s palm, and sucks on the point where his pulse is beating in his wrist. Then he laces his fingers together with Bucky’s as he kisses up the delicate skin on the inside of his arm to where his sleeve is rolled up to the elbow. 

“We—still—need—to talk.” Steve says, words punctuated with kisses up Bucky’s arm. Last, he leans in and places a final kiss on Bucky’s mouth, and Bucky leans into it even as Steve pulls away. 

“ _Bastard_ ,” Bucky says, panting a little and flexing his hand in Steve’s grip. Steve smiles, but doesn’t let him have his hand back, preventing further mischief for the moment. 

Bucky pouts his bottom lip, and it’s almost enough to break him anyway. But then Bucky laughs too, relenting and tipping his head back again against the hawthorn root. “Yeah, you’re probably right.” 

“Usually,” Steve says, smirking back at him. 

Bucky runs his thumb over the back of Steve’s hand and sighs, pulling it into his lap and covering their linked fingers with his free one too. “Okay. Let’s hear it.” 

“You’re the one who’s been destroying things on the project site.” It’s not a question, they’d both seen it. 

“Yeah.” 

“That’s—I’m part of that project. You know that, it’s why I even came to these woods in the first place. To okay them to be cleared.” The words feel like acid leaving Steve’s throat, but he has to say them. 

Bucky squeezes his eyes shut. “Yeah.” 

“So what—what does that mean? I can’t—if I file my report, the project site will be cleared. Including this ring. What happens to you if—if the ring is gone?” 

Bucky opens his eyes, gazing over the edge of the mossy hollow, out across the clearing. He raises their linked hands and kisses the back of Steve’s fingers. He looks up at Steve again and his eyes are pure, slate grey. 

“I’ll die, Steve.” He smiles, sadly. “It’s okay, I’ve done it before.” 

Steve is frozen for a moment, staring back at him. Then he yanks his hand away from Bucky, and scrambles to his feet, staggering back to brace himself on the edge of the hollow. 

“You’ll—no— _no_ —”

Bucky shakes his head, expression sorrowful but calm, too collected for what he’s saying, and it causes a bright flare of anger in Steve’s chest. 

“Steve,” he says, soothingly, the voice one uses to talk a child out of a tantrum. He rises to his feet. “There’s nothing you can do about it. It’s just—how it works. I should have been dead a long time ago, but I just happened to be in the right place. Because I was lucky, I got decades I shouldn’t have. And now my luck is out and I—” 

“ _No_ ,” Steve says again, emphatic. “I’m not going to let that happen. I can—I won’t file my report, I’ll say that—”

“Somebody else will— _Steve_ , be realistic,” Bucky says, voice infuriatingly even. “It’s like Natasha said, my life here as what I am is conditional, and conditions change! I don’t _blame_ you this is just—it’s just _life_ and death is a part of that too!” 

Steve’s hands clench into fists at his sides and he shakes his head, violently. “I know that—don’t you think I _know_ that? But this isn’t—it’s not like you’re _sick_ or—this is something I can _change_ Bucky—” 

“How?” Bucky demands, taking a cautious step forward, hands raised placatingly by his sides. “If you try to stop this, the only life you’ll change is your own, Steve. I know how your world works, remember? This will still go forward, but you’ll have _ruined_ yourself, and for what?” 

“For _what_?” Steve sputters, incredulous. “For—for _you_ , damn it, _Bucky_ , I’m not going to stand by while—”

“While inevitability comes for both of us? Steve, please hear what I’m saying. I don’t _want_ you to do anything, I just want—” he takes in a sharp, frustrated breath and runs his hands through his hair. “I want you to kiss me goodbye. And I want you to be able to keep _living_. I mean it—I’m not sorry for what happened to me, that I got to have _this_ before—before it was over. But it was stolen time, Steve. You have to understand I’ve always known that.” 

Steve’s heart is thundering in his chest, but he tries to corral his thoughts in the face of Bucky’s utter calm resignation. To mount an argument. 

“Bucky,” he says, keeping his voice as steady as he can. “You can’t—I can’t lose you. Not like that. Not when I could do something about it.” 

“Steve,” Bucky says his name again softly, stepping forward again to pick up both of Steve’s hands in his. “There’s nothing _to do_ , that’s what I’m trying to make you understand. It’s just a question of how we accept it. And I don’t want to go knowing I’d destroyed you too.” 

“Buck, I can’t—I can’t watch someone I love die—not again, not when there’s a chance—”

Sudden understanding flashes on Bucky’s face, and Steve has to look away from him then, look down at their hands so that he doesn’t have to see the sympathy and sadness and compassion there. 

“Oh sweetheart,” Bucky whispers, leaning in to press his forehead to Steve’s. “This all feels so fresh for you, doesn’t it? I’m sorry. But it isn’t the same, I promise you.”

Steve’s chin quivers traitorously, and Bucky brushes his hand over Steve’s cheek, cradling his face. “You love me?” Bucky asks, voice betraying him with a small shake in the question. 

Steve takes in a halting breath. He hadn’t known it before he’d said it. He frees his hands from Bucky’s to wrap around his waist, tucking his face into Bucky’s neck. “I do. Please don’t make me do this. Don’t ask me for this.” 

“You love me.” It’s a statement, and Bucky’s voice contains wonder and something else underneath that Steve can’t name as he says it. Bucky’s arms close around Steve’s shoulders, one hand stroking through his hair. “You’re right. I’m sorry. That’s a terrible thing to ask of someone who loves you, or of someone you love.” 

Steve lifts his face from Bucky’s shoulder, and Bucky’s lips find his at once, softly—saying a hundred things more than words can. Steve closes his eyes and kisses him, sealing a promise within himself and willing Bucky to let him make it. 

Bucky kisses him one more time, long and deep. Then he wraps his arms tighter around him, hard enough for Steve’s ribs to protest, and Steve hugs him back the same. 

Bucky draws away, hand sliding down to wrap again in one of Steve’s, pulling him gently back down to the mossy bed between the roots. 

“Come here, come back to me—just for a little while.” Bucky says, tucking Steve against him as they stretch out, chin resting on the top of his head. Steve allows himself to be led. He doesn’t want to fight, not with Bucky—he has to save his fight for the coming days…

“I’ll do whatever it takes, Bucky. I’m not going to watch you die.” He says, words feeling suddenly slow and drowsy as he nods against Bucky’s chest. 

“I know. I won’t ask that of you. I promise. Just…rest a little while.” Bucky says. 

Steve nods sleepily, feeling his eyelids drag at the suggestion. 

Through his haze, he feels Bucky lift his hand, kissing the center of his palm. The place where his lips touch feels cool even after they’re gone, and there’s something soft against his skin. Steve’s hand curls around it automatically. 

“I love you, Steve,” Bucky whispers.

The sun falls in honeyed, heavy beams between the leaves of the hawthorn.

Steve’s mind wades through it like an ant trapped in the sticky sweetness, before he comes back to himself, fully awake. 

He sits up, a little confused—had he meant to fall asleep? Steve blinks the sunspots from his eyes, shading them. God, these sleepless nights are starting to catch up with him. He doesn’t even remember what he’d been working on. 

He frowns down at himself, realizing he doesn’t have his camera or soil sampling equipment on him, either. 

Steve peers up at the hawthorn. That’s right—he’d promised himself another look at it, when he’d stumbled across it while he was taking measurements for the report. It really is a gorgeous specimen. He sighs, wishing hawthorns were on his protected genus list. 

Steve hauls himself up from the little depression between the roots where he’d apparently nodded off, and brushes off his jeans with one hand. 

The other, he realizes, is closed around something, and he opens it to inspect. It’s a slightly crushed handful of small blue flowers— _Myosotis Sylvatica_ , forget-me-nots. Steve frowns at the little clearing around the hawthorn tree, but he doesn’t see any growing near it. He must have picked them up somewhere on his way, though he doesn’t recall…

Steve shrugs, and drops the crumpled flowers into a space between the roots, tugging his jacket on straighter. 

Whatever he came out here for, he guesses he got more than he’d bargained for if he’d accidentally ended up catnapping on the ground. Maybe that means he’ll actually be able to get a decent night’s sleep tonight for the first time in this damn country. 

Steve tugs his jacket straighter, reaching for his notepad so that he can at least jot a few things down on his walk back and make it not an entirely wasted afternoon. But it’s not there. He really must’ve been out of it when he set out from the flat. 

_Oh well_ , he thinks, straightening his jacket, almost too warm in the sunshiney stillness of the clearing. Time to get back and be efficient now that he’s got a few unexpected minutes of rest under his belt. 

He pauses one last time at the edge of the clearing, looking regretfully at the graceful, spreading branches of the hawthorn. 

It really is a beautiful tree. 

***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm........so sorry. 
> 
> Feel free to yell at me in the comments.


	10. Ten

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This feels like a good time to remind you of the most important tag on this story which is: angst WITH A HAPPY ENDING. 
> 
> (But also be aware of the other tags as your fair warning that things are going to look worse before they look better. If you would rather wait until tomorrow so the _temporary_ aspect of some tags is more temporary than waiting over night for the next chapter to resolve it I FULLY understand and please feel free to do so). 
> 
> That said we are.....not there yet. This might sting a bit.

All around the village, and trailing out into the meadows and woods too, the warm spring sunshine is finally paying dividends.

The cramped, messy little garden beneath Steve’s flat is bursting with growth, spilling out over the confines of the old planter boxes. 

English roses suddenly seem to be scrambling up and over every wall and trellis and window frame he walks by. Blooms in every color nod drowsily in the sun, bobbing gently as fat bees hop from one to the next. Everything about the warmth and color feels sleepy, somehow, not muted exactly, but a little blurred around the edges of Steve’s vision. Like a painting, maybe, high on color but a little light in some places on the details. 

It only takes another two days for him to finish the report and send it off to Peggy with his official stamp, even with the strange sleepiness muffling the days. 

Steve’s a little troubled by how easily it came together, actually. He’d collected a lot more data than he’d realized before sitting down to knock some work out on it. Enough that he really only had to finish compiling it and making his final summary and recommendations. 

It _feels_ like there was still more he was supposed to do…something. But he scans it over a final time, and it looks as thorough as any other impact study he’s ever completed. So he shrugs the feeling off, and hits send. 

Peggy calls him within five minutes, and demands that they all meet for a drink to celebrate. Steve agrees, because what else does he have to do? ( _Something, there’s something else he was supposed to be doing…_ )

He finds Peggy and Angie already holed up at their table, procuring it per usual as if by magic in the ever crowded pub. 

They’ve already got a bottle of champagne open on the table and three glasses, and they both clap as he walks over. Steve rolls his eyes, but grins as he pulls out his chair. 

“You _guys_ I’m an adult man, I don’t need gold stars for finishing the job you’re _paying_ me to do.” 

“Ohhh ho hum,” Angie mocks him, clinking her glass against the one in front of him until he picks it up. “Have you ever considered, Steven, that some of us just like champagne?” 

“Yes and really,” Peggy adds, “there’s been little enough to celebrate on this damn thing, let a woman enjoy a milestone at your expense, please!” 

“Alright, alright,” Steve relents, lifting his glass so that they can all cheers in the center of the table. 

“To being one step closer to wrapping this bloody project up,” Peggy says, and they clink their glasses again. 

They sip their champagne, and Steve scrunches his nose at the tickle of the bubbles before setting it down with a sigh. 

“How is it going, Peg? Progress?”

“Hmph.” Peggy says. “I suppose with this in for approval we can’t help but make some. First site is humming along despite delays so I think the new team will be ready to break ground on the school as soon as we get permits—early next week I should hope. Everyone wants this thing done, I’ve never seen a permitting office so willing to push things through before. My contact told me he’s intending to work through the weekend. But I hear rumblings that the school is practically unlivable now that the weather’s turned, and no one is looking forward to another year with the old classrooms packed to the gills if we can’t pick up the pace.” 

Steve frowns, nodding. 

“It’s odd, isn’t it? To have had this many weird things happen…?” 

“I don’t know about _odd_ , but certainly—”

“Guys,” Angie cuts in, face pleading. “Work talk, do we have to? I thought we were celebrating that Steve’s job is _done_ , let’s live a little here!” 

Peggy huffs, but smiles at Angie and takes another sip of her champagne. “Very well, _darling_ , what did you have in mind?” 

Angie’s smile turns coy as she cuts her eyes at Steve. “Was kinda hoping Steve would finally break down and tell us who he’s been sneaking around with the past week— _urmph_.” Angie’s sentence cuts off in a pained grunt, and the table tilts so that Steve has to reach out to keep the champagne bottle steady, making it very obvious that Peggy has just kicked her under the table. 

“I’m sure _Steve_ would tell us if he had anything he wanted to share with the class _Ange_ ,” she says, meaningfully. 

Steve laughs a little, looking between the two of them as they continue a forceful argument of some kind with their eyes.

“Well _I’m_ sure Steve doesn’t have any clue what you mean,” he says. 

It’s Angie’s turn to roll her eyes. “Yeah, okay. I get it.” 

Steve laughs again, “Seriously, where’s this coming from?” 

They share another wordless exchange, at the end of which Peggy turns to him with a neutral kind of expression. “You just seemed a bit—preoccupied last week. I told Angie she was imagining things and that you have plenty of reasons which you are _fully allowed_ to keep to yourself.” 

Last week—right, they’d been having dinner here, after the first graffiti had appeared on the building. He _had_ been distracted. He’d apologized to Peggy about it. 

“Jeez Pegs, he’s a grown up he can keep it to himself if he wants, I’m just _asking_.” She turns her eyes to Steve, looking keen. “Anyway I don’t think Peggy’s giving you enough credit—plus you said your distractions weren’t _noble_ ones and that seemed just like the kinda Steve Rogers thing you’d say about meeting someone on the sly—”

“ _Angie_!” Peggy interjects, rolling her eyes heavenward in some kind of plea. 

Steve just smiles and shakes his head, shrugging. “Sorry to disappoint. Guess I was just—just regular distracted, no good excuse.” 

“Hmm.” Angie says. 

“That’s fine.” Peggy says louder. “And look at you, report in in record time despite your snags.” 

“Yeah,” Steve agrees, not sure why his stomach wants to tie itself into a knot at that. 

“Okay, well regardless I’m still nixing work talk.” Angie says, reclaiming her composure, and grinning brightly. “If I remember right your visa’s good for what, two more months? Tell us what you’re going to do with your vacation! You’re gonna come see my next show right?” 

Steve sighs, but it’s fond. He doesn’t have any good answers to their questions, as per usual, because truthfully he hasn’t thought that far ahead. But he submits to their cheerful interest and efforts to take care of him with as much grace as he can muster. Eventually, the champagne does its own work, and he asks Angie about her auditions in the West End and enjoys it as she gets more and more animated in her recounting of the backstage dramas. 

It’s not until he’s letting himself back into his flat later, fingers fumbling a little fuzzily with the keys, that he feels that creeping sense of melancholy come over him again. 

It increases as he kicks off his boots and climbs into pajamas. He makes himself tea, and turns on his playlist of Irish folk tunes. 

But it’s an odd sensation, as he goes through the motions. This is how he’s soothed himself other nights, when his sadness about his mom got too big for him and he just had to let it overtake him until he could sleep. 

When he thinks about her, he _is_ sad. He never stopped being. He still misses her with a fierce ache. 

But somehow, as he prods at the familiar wound he finds that it’s strangely…off-center from whatever it is he’s feeling tonight. There’s some other hurt there that he can’t put a name to. 

Ultimately he drinks his tea, decides on a sleeping pill despite his nap earlier, and simply lets it be. 

He’s sure whatever it is that’s bothering him will come to him eventually. 

 

The next few days are even more hazy and dull than the ones when he’d first arrived and hadn’t had work yet to do, because then at least he’d had the _prospect_ of something to look forward to as he killed time. 

He can’t really make plans to leave yet, even if he wanted to, not until the permits clear and he’s certain he won’t be needed for any followup supplementary materials on his original study. 

And even if he could, Steve just doesn’t have the drive to make plans. Which is of course why Peggy had brought him over to do this job in the first place. He feels a little more in charge of himself than he’d been when he’d boarded that plane in an utter haze of grief. But he still feels a bit—suspended. Caught in a web of indecision. It’s a precarious situation, as being caught in any kind of web usually is. He’s not sure what will happen if he just stays uncertainly in the middle of it, what’s headed his way, but he also doesn’t know what’s underneath to catch him if he breaks the tenuous threads of it and falls into the next thing. 

He compromises, and decides that he’ll just make plans to decide later. Which is close enough to progress that he feels like he doesn’t have to push himself any harder. 

He goes to the library, and skims through a couple of travel books. A pretty, dark-haired librarian greets him by name with a smile, and asks if he’s already onto the next project. 

Steve laughs and agrees that yes, he is. Her name is Sarah, he recalls, vaguely. They’d met last week. 

It makes Steve feel unsettled that he can’t quite remember why, and he leaves quickly without checking any of the books out. Sarah gives him a mildly perplexed look as he makes his retreat, and Steve feels guilty. She’d been nice to him, he thinks. But the thought itches under his skin in a deep, opaque way he needs to escape from. So he leaves. 

 

He talks to Sam on the phone, who demands that he send him some photos from the project site. Steve opens an email while they chat, and attaches a few pictures from Brightneau Wood. He hesitates, finger hovering over a photograph of the flowering hawthorn, feeling like he shouldn’t send that one. But then he shakes his head and clicks to attach it anyway. 

“Oh shit that hawthorn is huge,” Sam says as he clicks through the email. He sighs. “I wish you knew fuck-all about birds, I have so many questions I want to ask you that you definitely can’t answer.” 

“There was a blackbird nest in that one,” Steve says, with sudden certainty. 

“Oh yeah?” Sam asks. 

“Yeah it was…it hatched three chicks.” 

“Damn you got close enough to see? They’re usually pretty aggressive if you get close.” 

“I—” Steve hesitates and rubs his forehead, feeling like he might have a headache coming on. “I was pretty quiet, I think. Anyway they’ll be out of the nest before it gets cleared, so that’s good.” 

“Yeah for sure,” Sam agrees, before asking about one of the other pictures. 

Steve takes a tylenol for his head after they hang up. 

 

He’s passing by a little picket fence grown over with roses, and it seems to him like the chipped wood of it is being tested by the enthusiastic weight of the blooms. Steve bends down to smell one, thinking of the little tea rose his mom had managed to keep alive in a pot on their fire escape over the years. It hadn’t had a scent, really, but he’s still reminded of it now. 

He straightens up, and realizes that he’s come upon the far corner of the construction site at the edge of the meadow. The permits had come through yesterday, and even now as he watches there’s a bulldozer beginning to tear up the uneven ground of the meadow beyond the cobblestone lane. 

And on the low stone wall bordering the road away from town along the edge of it there are a series of messy, scrawling words in red paint. 

_Here was a Sergeant’s final stand, here he’s laid to rest._

Steve feels like he’s been punched in the stomach, all the breath going out of him in a painful rush. 

He braces his hands on the wooden fence, between the tangles of roses. 

There’s something—something to the words if he could only—his head is splitting as he grasps at the feeling, that haunted, hunted feeling he’s had all week if only he could—

His blood is pounding in his ears, adrenaline high and body tense like it is during a fight, only all there is in front of him are a few words in red and a feeling that it means something. 

His heart aches, and it’s like he can hear a dozen different harmonies being sung all around him as to why, but can’t seem to find the melody. 

And then, as quickly as it had hit him, it’s gone. 

Steve pants a little, flexing his fingers on the beam of the fence. There’s sun in his eyes, blinding him momentarily. He blinks it away, and with it goes the pain that had threatened at his temples. 

He keeps walking, a little shakily. 

Sitting on top of the broad stone wall, a red cat with green eyes watches him go. 

 

Steve determines that he’s coming down with something. Or has come down with something already. Either way, it feels like the only explanation for why he seems to be having these strange, slow days. 

He buys a new kind of seasonal allergy medication at the pharmacist’s recommendation. 

He looks at rail passes for the summer. 

He fixes his landlady’s broken garden box when the wood containing her thyme plant splinters. 

He doesn’t go near the meadow or the new construction again. 

A week of days pass, out of tune. 

 

Friday afternoon finds him sitting on the rickety stairs up to his flat in the late afternoon sunlight. 

He isn’t thinking about anything in particular, aside from tracking the slow progress of a fat bumblebee tumbling in and out of blossoms on a trailing sweet pea vine in the garden below. 

He feels…fine. His heart may _feel_ like it’s ringing a little too hollowly in an empty chest, but there’s no reason for it, as he reminds himself again. No new reason.

One moment his eyes are on the dip of the bee climbing out of a pink flower, hands loose in his lap and his head tipped listlessly against the railing of the staircase. 

The next, his vision is filled with spots, like the sun has decided to glint off of every dust mote hanging in front of him at once. He blinks rapidly, trying to clear it. 

And when it has, he remembers. 

_Bucky._

 

Steve chokes down a strangled sob that tries to claw its way out of his throat as the remembering hits him with full force. At once, that place under his ribs which had been empty and carved out feels violent and teeming with the flood of it, threatening to drown him entirely. 

The hawthorn. The faerie ring. The blackbirds. The fae. 

Bucky’s laugh. Bucky’s eyes. Bucky’s mouth on his. 

The vision. The argument. The forget-me-nots. 

_I love you, please don’t ask me to do this._

_That’s a terrible thing to ask of someone you love_ , Bucky had promised. 

He’d—Bucky had _tricked_ him, used his magic, made him forget so that he wouldn’t—he’d _sworn_ he wouldn’t watch Bucky die, that he’d do whatever it took. And Bucky had made sure he couldn’t—couldn’t do anything until—

But if Bucky had used his magic to make Steve forget, and that spell had held for _days_ …

He realizes, horrified, that he can only think of one reason why he would be free of it now. 

Steve is stumbling down the steps and fighting with the latch to the gate before the thought has made it all the way through his head, tears on his cheeks. 

_I’m already too late._

It doesn’t register to Steve that he’s barefoot until he hits the end of the meadow and begins to pick his way over and between the felled piles of timber that had once been the fringes of Brightneau wood.

Tidy stacks of oak and beech and birch sit in clusters where they’ve been placed by the machines, ready for mulching. Steve hurdles over a stump marked with spray paint, and feels a jagged splinter of wood cutting into the unprotected sole of his foot. But there’s no way he’s going to go back or even slow down at this point, so he grits his teeth and ignores it, and tries to place his feet as carefully as he can without sacrificing haste. 

He still can’t help but stumble when the hawthorn comes into his sightline, sprawling flat and bloodying his palms as he catches himself on the uneven ground. Steve hisses in pain, and picks a shard of wood from his palm, but plunges ahead regardless. 

The crew of bright orange-clad workmen is centered around the ring, though they don’t know it. 

The hulking, ugly mass of the yellow industrial logger is parked at the edge of it, russet mushrooms crushed beneath its tracks as it waits to do its work. 

Steve skids to a halt beside it, eyes wide and horrified taking in the half-felled hawthorn. Now that he’s close he can see that it still stands, reaching toward the cloudless blue sky—but its large, lower boughs have been stripped to the ground and scattered around it in preparation for the logger to come in and finish the job. 

A man in a yellow construction hat and a harness is belaying down from the higher reaches, chainsaw in hand as he calls to one of the ones below. 

“Think that’s enough?”

“You look good Joe—should have plenty of clearance!” Yells the one below. 

Steve staggers forward, finally catching one of the workman’s eyes. 

“Whoa mate—this is an active site, you can’t be out here!” He says, holding up his hands to herd Steve backwards, an annoyed look on his face. 

“I—I’m with Carter & Falsworth,” he gasps, “I did the environmental impact report but you—you’ve gotta stop, there’s—”

“Problem?” Asks the foreman with a frown. “You got I.D. or papers or something?” 

“I—yeah, just—stop—” Steve struggles to sound coherent, groping in his back pocket and thanking anything that’s listening that he had his wallet on him. He pulls out his license and shoves it at the foreman, trying to keep the wild-eyed look off of his face. But his eyes are pulled anyway to the broken form of the hawthorn tree, the hacked up turf of the clearing, the crumpled mushrooms of the ring, bile rising in his throat. 

“Mmm.” The foreman says, dubiously, handing it back. “Look mate, we got our permits and our parameters, so unless you got an injunction or something…”

“You don’t understand, it’s—” Steve pleads, closing his eyes tight around the heart-sick feeling dragging him down and grasping for any kind of lie to make the man with the chainsaw _stop_. 

The foreman throws his hands up in irritation. “Look, I don’t want to get into some kinda face-off with the EA here. It’s been a long bloody week. But I got a feeling you don’t have any kinda paperwork says I can’t finish up my contract.” ” He eyes Steve mercilessly, and Steve watches his gaze trail over Steve’s bloody hands and bare feet. “Still I don’t feel like standing around waiting for the police to come get you outta my hair at four on a damn Friday. _Joe!_ ” He directs the last at the man now unhooking the one with the chainsaw from his harness. “We’re calling it a day—you promised a round, time to pay up!” 

Steve’s chest is heaving, and he tries not to sound like it when the man turns back to him. “We start again Monday unless I get official papers from C&F _or_ an injunction from the EA, you got it?” 

Steve nods, frantically. 

“Bloody lunatic,” the foreman mutters, moving over to the logger with a ring of keys and locking the cab shut. Then he motions to the other members of the crew who have now gathered around, looking at Steve curiously. But they seem happy enough to follow the foreman as he tromps away through the ragged stumps, muttering under his breath. 

Steve watches them go, tension rippling through his rigid frame until they move out of sight around the intact line of trees toward the road. 

Then he spins and throws himself over the fallen boughs of the hawthorn. 

He touches trembling fingers to the tips of growth at the end of a branch that landed beside the trunk. There are bright green leaves there, still soft to the touch, that had until minutes ago been full of new life, stretching out into the bright spring air. Steve breaks off a sprig, cradling it in his hands. 

“Bucky?” He asks into the utter stillness. 

He’s never heard such silence, in all the times he’s been here. Never realized before how _loud_ the woods had been, how full of life with birdsong and bugs and breezes which have now fled, all of them, in the wake of the machines. 

“ _Bucky_ ,” he tries again, voice breaking on a sob, bowing his head over the broken sprig in his hands. 

“Steve.” 

The voice is soft, not even enough to call a whisper. Steve’s eyes fly open, already certain he imagined what he wanted to hear. 

But Bucky is there, stepping around gouged trunk of the hawthorn. 

He’s there, but he also isn’t, faded around the edges. Steve crosses the space between them, and tries to sweep Bucky into his arms—but finds that Bucky’s figure winks and blurs away from him. 

“Steve, I’m sorry—” Bucky says, his face sorrowful as Steve strains his eyes to see it. His voice is like the stirring of leaves, and no more. “I tried to be sure you wouldn’t feel this part...”

He trails off as a shiver runs through the circle. 

“Bucky, Bucky I’m sorry I would’ve—I tried to—”

“I know,” Bucky says. Or maybe Steve just feels the words, like a caress of air across his cheek. “I love you.” 

Another breeze stirs through the clearing, a real one this time. And Steve finds he can’t see the features of Bucky’s face anymore, or his clothes, or his hands…and then he’s nothing but a shower of golden motes of dust, falling to the ground at the foot of the hawthorn. 

Gone. 

“ _No no no_ ,” Steve whispers, uselessly, sinking to his knees. He reaches shaking fingers to touch the ground where the last little glints of dust are winking themselves dark amidst the leaf-strewn dirt. 

Steve puts his face in his hands, and allows the shaking to overtake him completely. He feels numb all over—but it’s the numbness of slipping with a knife against your finger, looking at the whiteness around the wound just before it starts to bleed, and you know it’s going to hurt badly the next moment. 

He takes in a shuddering breath, preparing for it, readying himself to open his eyes again on the empty place where Bucky had been.

“For what it’s worth,” says a voice from behind him, cutting across his blank numbness, “he _did_ believe he could keep you from knowing of this.”

Steve gasps in surprise, twisting on his knees to fall backward against the trunk. 

Natasha is standing in the space between the tree and the edge of the still untouched line of the forest. 

Beside her, several of the other fae separate themselves from the shadows between the trees, stepping out into the sun to range themselves around her. He recognizes a few of them—Wanda, her soft features sad, the bored blond man, Maria, the yellow-eyed man with the dark skin, Hope. 

“What?” Steve asks, trying to process her words. 

Natasha’s eyes flicker down to the place where Bucky had disappeared. “His spell. Of forgetting. He couldn’t know that it would end at his death—our magic has a life of its own. He did think he could spare you.” 

Steve shakes his head, despairing. “I don’t—I don’t care about that. Just— _help_ him, _fix this_ —”

Natasha redirects her gaze to Steve, and smiles tightly. 

“That,” she says, with a little shake of her head, “is not why we are here.” 

Steve’s mouth opens in confusion, staring around at the gathered fae. They aren’t dressed for a ball this time—they look much more like what they are. Each of them attired in simple green and brown, they look if anything like they might be Robin Hood’s outlaw band. Hope even carries a quiver of arrows slung across her back, and the yellow-eyed man has a dagger through his belt. 

Steve _hates_ them. 

“Then what the _fuck_ are you here for?” He demands, rising from his knees to stand with his back to the tree, fists clenched. “What _good_ are you if you can’t even help one of your own!” 

“No one ever told you that the Fair Folk were good, Steven Grant Rogers,” Maria says, cool blue eyes assessing him. 

“The dryad knew his terms,” adds the dark-skinned man in a deep voice. 

“ _Heimdall_ ,” Wanda says softly, tone almost warning. She turns her luminous eyes to Steve. “I told you both to remember, what it was you’d chosen when you stood before us. He chose you. And he chose not to fight what would happen.” 

Steve’s feels his face crumpling, and he turns away from them to marshal his expression. Whatever he feels, however his grief takes him after this, it’s not meant to be shared with these cold, pitiless creatures. 

“You can’t—you can’t just _let_ him be—you have _magic_!”

“Magic isn’t all things to all people at all times—and neither are we. But we do take care of our own.” Natasha says, with a meaningful look behind her. “And _that_ is why we’ve come.” 

“I don’t understand,” Steve says, willing his voice not to break. He wants to be far from here. _No_ —he wants the _fae_ to be far from here, to leave him alone to sink down between the roots of the hawthorn in peace. 

“Fionn,” Natasha says, beckoning the blond man forward to stand beside her. “I told you that we know what you are, Steven Grant Rogers, child of the _foraoise ag gáire_. We know because it was the fae of the Laughing Forest who left you in the cradle that belonged to the child of Sarah Katherine Rogers, when we took her child from her.” 

“You _what_? I—,” Steve is stunned by this new line of attack and the ripple cast through the sea of his grief by Natasha carelessly tossing his mother’s name into the middle of it. 

Natasha bows her head, in acknowledgment. “She was a formidable woman. We do not cast off those we expect to survive. Don’t you know about changelings?” 

Steve shakes his head, mutely, but he notes that Hope makes a surprised noise, and Heimdall shifts restlessly on his feet. 

“The fae are not many. And your world continues driving us outward, so that we are fewer still,” Natasha says. “On occasion we have need of stronger stock, and so we make a trade—a healthy baby for one of our own that is not. You should have died as a child—it was a surprise when you arrived before our Court as you are now. But we are not sorry to see you.” 

Steve starts back, or would if not for the solid bark behind him. “My mom—”

“Fionn’s mother, by birth, did well by you.” Natasha concedes. “But you have no need to remain as you are. Reclaim your place with us—we’ll be moving on from these woods soon, for another less hassled by human errors.” 

Fionn steps forward now, and there is a golden cup in his hand. Steve recognizes it, so similar to the one Natasha had offered him as he stood before the Fae Court, resisting their tricks as Bucky had made him promise to do. The man, who Steve sees now does look a little like he would—could, maybe, if his face and bearing had never been tempered by humanity, holds the goblet out toward him. 

And Steve finally understands what it is that they’re saying. 

Anger washes over him, a calming, steadying rage as he looks into a face so like and so unlike his own. 

It was _Steve_ who had crossed an ocean in Sarah Rogers’ arms, a sickly baby who’d grown into a sickly child. Who’d been soothed in his fevers by her tender, patient hands. Who’d loved her more than he’d loved anything else in his life. Who’d held her hand when her hair fell out, when she’d wasted away into a shadow of herself, when she’d uttered her final words to him—“my sunshine boy”—and when she’d taken her final breath. 

They’re offering him a chance never to be touched by death again, if only he’d trade everything that has been his life. 

Maybe if he’d never known her, he _could_ be like these ruthless, beautiful things before him. 

But he _is_ Sarah Rogers’ son, regardless of the circumstances that made it so. 

“Never,” he says, turning his eyes from the cup back to Natasha. 

“Don’t be a fool,” Fionn says, though his tone is dispassionate. 

Steve’s hands ball into fists, and he holds himself back from taking a swing at him. 

Instead he counts three breaths, raises his fist, and knocks the golden cup to the ground. The honeyed liquid inside seeps into the earth where Bucky had stood, drenching the sprig of hawthorn Steve hadn’t realized he’d still held in that hand. Steve wraps his arms around himself. 

“I’d rather die.” 

Natasha’s mouth thins dangerously, and she fixes him with that same piercing jade green stare he remembers from before. She takes in a long breath. 

Then she lets it out, and laughs, a bright, careless sound. 

“ _Humans_. Well then, you’ll have your wish, I imagine.” She waves her pale hand and Fionn steps back, fading away again toward the reaching leaves of the trees behind him. “I hope you enjoy it—your one, brief life.” 

She turns on her heel, red braid whipping over her shoulder as she stalks back toward the watching fae, each of whose eyes is trained on Steve with a variety of expressions, from disdainful to intrigued. 

One by one, they turn away from him, disappearing into the shadows. 

The last is Wanda, who lingers halfway in the light of the clearing a moment longer, her eyes not on Steve, but on the overturned goblet. He couldn’t say what her expression is. 

Steve watches warily as she flicks one final look at him. 

Then he blinks, and when his eyes open again Wanda and the cup have vanished with the rest. 

***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you forged ahead on Tuesday and are here despite my scary note at the top, you are the bravest type of person and ummmmm I'm so sorry. Again. I promise tomorrow will help?? Seriously #softendingsonly2k19 I really really promise.
> 
> And maybe in the meantime, share your angst with me gently? It'll all work out tomorrow but for now my feelings are a little tender too.


	11. Eleven

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay lovelies, we are here. Let's fix this shit. 
> 
> With some bonus, gorgeous art at the end to add some healing.

Steve isn’t quite sure how long he stays there like that, propped up against the bare trunk of the hawthorn.

But he comes back to himself with a snap, filled with the certainty that he can’t bear to be there any longer. 

He looks numbly at the path back through the cleared stumps that would take him home to his flat. But he can’t bear that either, the thought of returning there now. 

If he goes back, he’ll have to deal with this…this _after_. 

It was the same way he’d felt sitting in his car outside of the hospice care when his mom had died. He hadn’t wanted to put the key in the ignition, to go back to the apartment and see all around him the things that would need to be done now to cement the reality that she was gone and everything had changed. 

There was an odd lesson which Steve had learned in the days after his mom had passed. One that he isn’t keen to relearn quite this soon. And it’s that in the wake of losing someone you love, there’s an utterly mundane paradox. 

In many ways, you go on knowing that nothing after they are gone will ever be the same. The fabric of life has changed, it’s being woven with one less color strand in the pattern. 

And yet, for every stupid thing that reminds you that things are irrevocably different—the paperwork, and the sympathy flowers, and the absence of their voice when you walk into a room, the missing, missing, _missing_ —there are all the hundred other ways that life moves on at exactly the same pace it had before. There’s no leave of absence or recognition of the change in the passing of time, or the mail that stacks up needing to be dealt with, or small talk required by the cashier at the grocery store, and the having to eat and sleep as regularly as you always have. For everyone else, the space around the loss closes up. 

Steve hadn’t born it well, those months ago. And he’d been stronger and more prepared for it then. He’d seen it coming, inexorably. 

The thought now of returning to his flat, of putting food into his body and checking his email, even of planning a way to escape it all with the buying of tickets and being surrounded by strangers—he can’t face it. Not now. 

And maybe he was never actually strong or prepared, because it had been Sam and Peggy who had helped ease the burden of Sarah’s absence. 

Nobody else will even know enough to give him the sympathetic, pitying looks he’d hated then. He’s truly alone in knowing the loss of James Barnes. Bucky. 

Part of him wants to lie down on the mossy earth and will himself into nothingness. But another part is filled with a restless drive to escape, not to look anymore at the harsh horizon of jagged stumps and piled up branches reminding him of everything he _hadn’t_ done in time. 

So instead he obeys the mindless buzzing drive to _run_ ringing in his ears, and plunges, heedless, into the gloomy clutches of Brightneau. 

Night is creeping up, slowly under the canopy as he watches only the ground under his feet, turning now and then without any intention. 

Maybe he’ll get himself lost enough that the forest and elements themselves will make his decision for him, take him over. 

He shivers violently as full darkness falls, and a damp grey mist rises to wind its way between the trees and muffle his steps. He lets the cold shake him, uncaring. 

Maybe, he thinks, he’ll find another faerie ring, a different one. There’s no Bucky now to protect him from their whims, and maybe they’ll treat him as they would any other human stupid enough to cross them this time since he refused their offer—maybe Loki will get his way and dance him to death, or they’ll set the hounds of the Hunt on him to be chased into a swift finish. 

Sometimes, he remembers, humans who meet the fae are simply rendered mad. Maybe he would forget all of this. 

But he knows, as soon as he thinks it, that he couldn’t bring himself to ask. Even if one of them stepped out from behind a tree at this very moment, bearing a new cup this time, one of forgetting—he couldn’t bring himself to drink of it. 

Forgetting Bucky, forgetting his mom and everything she’d done for him (more, so much more now he realizes than he ever knew before)…it would be the same as if he’d never known them at all. And if he’d wanted that he could have accepted Natasha’s offer and let his heart be frozen past caring for human things like death and loss and grief so big you want to drown in it. 

Because’s that why he’d said no, isn’t it? Looking into the fae’s impassive faces, untouched by the care of time—he’d known that what it meant to be one of them was to turn his back on the ones he’d loved and lost in the course of his small, human existence. He was never perfect, but he thinks he’s been a good man. It’s the one thing left to him, now. 

Steve wavers, and then drops down to sit on a half-crumbled fallen oak tree, his frozen knees creaking as they bend. 

His heart is pattering insistently against his ribcage, and he grunts at the unnecessary reminder that he’s _alive_ and that living is work, always. It aches, his chest, and Steve drops his head into his hands, propped on his knees. How is it possible for a heart to be so fragile and so strong at the same time? He _feels_ wounded, mortally so, and yet it keeps beating and insisting that he do better to keep it that way. 

The moon, which has been waning over the preceding days, comes up just a sliver between the black silhouette of leaves. But it’s enough to illuminate a little of the forest and the insistent, pale fog at Steve’s feet. 

He decides to keep walking, deeper into the forest. 

The night feels deep and cold enough to swallow him up. 

He desperately hopes it will.

But the sun rises, cruelly, in the clockwork way it always does.

In the steel grey chill of dawn, Steve steps out between a pair of matching tree trunks—and finds himself looking at a smooth ribbon of paved road. 

He isn’t lost at all, despite his efforts. Brightneau Wood, in a final act of betrayal, hadn’t allowed him to manage it, it seems. Somehow his desperate, twisting track of wandering through the night has deposited him back on the familiar route to town, only a few miles from where he’d left it a handful of hours and several lifetimes ago. 

Steve lets out a soft noise of anguish. 

But there’s no help for it. The forest has apparently refused to provide either the salvation or the oblivion he sought. 

He lets the road under his feet pull him back toward reality, one heavy step at a time. 

 

He’s limping badly by the time the road turns and brings the edge of town into his sights. Steve hadn’t paid much attention to his injured foot in his despair, but the sight of buildings rising out of the landscape acts as a reminder of all the demands that returning to real life bring, including those of his body protesting harsh treatment. 

The exhaustion that comes with it is welcome though. Steve thinks, or hopes, that he might even be able to sleep first—before any of the thinking and aches beyond the physical ones can fully manifest themselves. 

And he’s glad that it’s still early enough—and on a Saturday, he remembers distantly—that no one is up and about yet to observe his shambling return. Maybe he can still manage to disappear, at least for a little while, into the sanctuary (or prison) of his flat. 

The silver of a misty dawn has given way to an exuberant pink sunrise that seems to mock him as he unlatches the garden gate. His head is hanging, vision blurred and barely able to keep track of what’s under his feet, much less anything else around him at this point. 

Which may be why he doesn’t see the slim figure waiting for him on the spindly staircase of his apartment, until she rises to separate herself from the sheltering shadows. 

Of course, it might also be because there was nothing to see until she wished for him to. 

Wanda looks wan and misty herself, standing uncertainly at the base of the stairs. 

She’s wearing human clothes—a plain white blouse and ripped jeans, her hair braided in a messy crown around her head. She wouldn’t look particularly out of place, even with her bare feet, if Steve didn’t know any better. Her eyes are large and serious in her pale face as she regards Steve, who falters on the garden path as soon as he sees her. 

He’d thought he couldn’t feel anything, or was free of it at least until his body received the rest it needs. But at the sight of her, listing a little with one delicate hand on the railing of the staircase, the things he thought were dormant come roaring to life—and he suddenly feels much too much. He freezes, bringing a fist to his stomach as if to hold the wave of it back, and only just keeps himself from doubling over at the barrage. 

Steve clenches his jaw tight, grasping with all he has at some kind of control. 

Wanda takes a tentative step toward him, and Steve shakes with the effort to remain still. 

“Don’t,” he says through clenched teeth. 

For all that he spent his youth with black eyes and scraped knuckles between fights, Steve never really went out _hoping_ for them. He’s not violent by nature, and if he’d enjoyed anything it had been the sense of satisfaction he’d gotten from standing up to those who were—standing up for himself or other people who couldn’t. 

But looking at Wanda, waiting here for him whole and hale and unbothered by yesterday’s events, not understanding even enough to let him alone to his grief, he feels like he might be capable of violence. 

“Wasn’t I clear enough yesterday?” He asks, wrapping his arms around himself and gripping his elbows so that his hands can’t curl into fists. “Get _out_.” 

Wanda nods, stepping back again so that she’s half-shaded by the staircase. “I’m not here to convince you.” Her voice is as it's always been, as delicate as moonlight but as certain, too. And it has a quality that disarms him. 

Steve’s anger abandons him, his shoulders slumping. It’s a good thing, probably. But he wishes he could have held onto it anyway—anger is a fuel and guiding force he’s familiar with, and without it he’s left to tumble in a directionless swirl of everything else instead. 

“You’re hurt,” Wanda says, looking at his bloodied feet. Her voice slips around him like water, buoying him so that he has the strength at least to raise his head and meet her eyes. 

“It doesn’t matter,” he says. 

Wanda’s face creases in something that if Steve had any generosity of spirit left for the fae he might think was compassion. She lifts a hand, and he watches, numbly, as she shapes the air in front of her. A soft light, almost red in the pink morning, flows from her fingertips to wrap around his feet and hands and across his temple where he hadn’t realized he’d been caught and cut by some stray branch. It’s a soothing sensation, like the comforting brush of warm hands, and when it fades Steve can feel that his various scrapes and wounds have been closed and healed. 

“Steve,” she says, and a small corner of his clouded mind registers a little bit of surprise to hear her use his normal name. The other times the fae spoke to him it was to call him by his full one, and it had been clear it was to remind him of their power. “I want to know—do you fully understand, what it means to give up a life with the Fair Folk? You were blinded with grief when the question was put to you and I don’t—” she shakes her head and her mouth thins in frustration. “Natasha has never been fond of humans, even in the days when we were nearer to them than we are now. So she doesn’t understand—that you might have answered differently if she had chosen a kinder moment.” 

“I wouldn’t.” Steve says, standing straighter. “It was—cruel. You’re right. But I’m giving you the same answer now, even though you’re coming to me like this, pretending to be a friend. It’s still no.” 

Wanda nods slowly, studying his face with wide green eyes. “And you understand, that to refuse—to choose humanity—means that you _will_ die? When you spilled the wine, did you mean only to reject _us_? I want to know if you understand what it means that you might have lived forever.” 

Steve swallows, the words sinking like a stone to the pit of his stomach. She may be different, he thinks, from Natasha or the others. Maybe she does have some glimmer of understanding and sympathy that they don’t. But she still doesn’t _get_ it. She’s promising him the one thing he wants right now more than anything else—that at some point, today or in some thousand days, this will end. 

“I don’t want it.” He says, simply. 

Wanda nods again, once, keeping her eyes on his, and the gesture feels weightier, like the _amen_ that closes a prayer. 

“Alright.” She says. 

“Is that all?”

“No,” she says, turning to pick something up from one of the stairs behind her. She holds it out to Steve, and he takes it automatically. 

It’s a small unglazed clay pot, the surface stamped over with the faint trace of leaves—and in it, a fragile cutting of hawthorn. Steve curls his hands around it and feels his eyes welling with tears he wills not to fall, not yet. Not until Wanda leaves him well and truly _alone_. 

“Magic, Steven Grant Rogers,” Wanda begins, the words low and curiously smooth, like all the edges have been sanded off. It’s like a melody, except that she isn’t singing—but it’s musical nonetheless in the way it lingers in Steve’s mind. “Is something like the intersection of choice and change. You have as much control over it as you allow it to have over you.” She pauses, and Steve looks up again from the hawthorn cutting to meet her eyes. “I told you once to remember what you chose before us. You and James Buchanan Barnes.” 

The name is a swift kick to the stomach, and Steve releases a harsh, ragged breath. But he finds that he can’t look away from her. 

“You and he both, in your way, chose humanity. For him, it meant death—he chose to give up the life that he _did_ have. For you, it means death too, though in a different way—you chose to give away the life that you _might_ have had. His was not a trade, because the life he had was his already through magic—he received it in exchange for his first mortal death. He had nothing to gain in the bargaining, only something to lose. But you…” she trails off for a moment, cocking her head at him. “I still wonder if you understand what you have given away. But regardless—I think it should not be traded in exchange for nothing, however much you despise it.” 

Steve stares at her, entranced. There’s something, something important under her words that he won’t, _can’t_ dare to let himself consider…but hope is powerful and heady and disobedient. So he clutches his hands around the little would-be-tree in his hands, and hopes anyway. 

“This…can you…?” 

Wanda shakes her head with a small smile. “It is merely a symbol, a reminder of what was. He is no longer bound to it.”

Steve nods, dumbly, letting the pot in his hands sink a little in front of him. 

“The magic in that ring was unfocused, and James Barnes did not guide the terms of the exchange he made in spilling his blood there.” She says. “But you have an immortal life which you wish to trade for a mortal one, and the scales of that exchange are not in balance. Magic _craves_ balance, and you left a great deal of it on the forest floor when you spilled that goblet. I’ve brought it back to you. It is enough, I think—to afford two.” 

The hope that had subsided ignites again, and this time it’s a forest fire, blazing to consume her words, and Steve starts forward. His legs are suddenly shaking, too hard to hold him up anymore, and he crumples to his knees in front of her, dropping the pot with a clatter beside him on the cobblestones. 

“Are you—do you mean—” 

Wanda smiles, a real one this time. “Close your eyes, Steve, and listen to me.” 

Steve squeezes his eyes shut tight at once, and he feels Wanda step forward into his space, her soft fingertips at his temples. His hands come up to clasp around her denim-clad knees, grounding him as his hands tremble. 

“It will not be easy—he has not been human in many years.” She says, and the words weave around him, and even through the darkness of his own eyelids he can still see the red glimmer of light that wraps around him with them. And then she echoes the words Natasha had said in the clearing, but this time they are a balm rather than a knife, and Steve’s breath comes in gasps as his lungs pull the words and the magic deep into his chest. 

“Live them well together, Steven Grant Rogers—your two, brief lives.” 

He feels like he’s floating, formless within himself, and the cobblestones under his knees and the hands at his temples and the air in his lungs all ebb away from him for a moment. 

A last, silvery strand of Wanda’s voice drifts around him like a spiderweb on the breeze, clinging to his mind. 

“You both need rest. Go.” 

He opens his eyes, and Wanda is gone. 

Steve staggers to his feet.

Lingering at the edges of his vision, the garden is awash in little sparks of soft red light. A trail of it hovers and glints up the staircase in front of him, fading even as he blinks, and he scrambles to follow its path.

His flat is unlocked, thanks to his hasty departure the day before, though Steve doesn’t consider the why’s of it as anything but a gift right now as he struggles against himself not to think—not to hope anything until—

The flat is quiet and dark inside, everything just as he left it. Except…

Except the quiet figure of the man already asleep in Steve’s bed. 

The apartment floor feels like an ocean for how long it takes Steve to cross the hushed space. He ducks under the angled eave and sinks gently to his knees, not yet daring to touch. 

Bucky’s face is a little paler than usual, the dusting of freckles standing out against his olive skin without its usual tan. And his forehead is creased even as he breathes lightly in sleep. His hair is shorter now, too—it looks, Steve realizes, as it had in the vision he’d seen of the last time Bucky had been human and alive, tumbling in a disheveled wave over his brow. 

Steve catalogues the differences, hoarding them jealously as proof of the impossible. With each detail, each fine line around Bucky’s eyes and mouth, each silver glint in the stubble on his jaw, Steve allows himself to fill with the thought that the world—the ambivalent, uncaring world that allowed the sun to rise today even in his desolation—may truly, for reasons he’s still grasping, have shifted itself on its axis to allow him this mercy.

Steve reaches up with shaking, disbelieving fingers to push the lock of hair back from Bucky’s eyes. He lets out an involuntarily, choked little sob as his fingers meet the soft strands, and then trail down Bucky’s face—a little damp with sweat and utterly, _painfully_ real. 

Bucky stirs at Steve’s touch, his fingers clenching into fists in the sheet twisted around him, but he doesn’t wake. 

Steve runs his fingers through Bucky’s hair again, savoring it—savoring each soothing breath that passes between Bucky’s lips in a soft, steady rhythm. 

He blinks jerkily, realizing that he’d begun to nod a little in place bowed over Bucky under the spell of his even breaths. 

He’s exhausted, he realizes. But it’s strange how realizing his weariness for the second time in the space of an hour tastes so very different to him. 

An hour ago he’d been glad—had hoped that maybe if he fell asleep feeling as bone-tired as he’d ever been, maybe it would be a long, long time before he woke up and had to face anything at all. That maybe he’d never have to wake up to the world without Bucky in it. 

And now? 

Now Steve rises quietly from his knees, and takes his eyes off Bucky just long enough to shuck his grimy clothes so that he can crawl into the narrow, single bed beside him. 

Now he wraps Bucky’s warm, pliant body in his arms, all breath-taking skin to skin under the comforter, and Bucky shifts in his sleep to nestle against his chest. 

The dam that Steve has been holding in place—saving up the rush of everything until he got back here, to his dark bed alone—comes crashing down now that he _is_ here, sharing the pillow he’d intended to muffle his tears with. He can’t help the confused shuddering sobs that overtake him, and he lets himself weep as quietly as he can into Bucky’s hair. 

Eventually he’ll actually think through the events of the past day and pick apart each scene and process everything that’s happened. But right now he simply breathes through the mad, heady mixture as it floods down his cheeks without naming any of it. Everything is so much. But Bucky is _here_. 

And when he’s cried out, hiccuping into stillness again, he lets the weariness settle into him feeling not like emptiness, but contentment. 

  
***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ISN'T THAT ART BEAUTIFUL? I hope it heals your poor weary hearts a little. Please go give the art and starshieldfolder some love on [tumblr!!](https://starshieldfolder.tumblr.com/post/185225147686/second-piece-for-the-caprbb-2019-based-on-the)
> 
> Thank you for your gentle angsting yesterday, please feel free to return to whatever volume feels appropriate. People commenting, you're the best! Can't wait to share the end. 
> 
> Final chapter up tomorrow, and don't worry: it's a long one.


	12. Twelve

The day is listing toward evening when Steve opens his eyes again.

Sometime during their sleep they’d shifted positions, and Steve finds his face nearly smushed into the bare stucco wall with Bucky pressed up against his back. 

Steve rolls over as gently as he can not to disturb him, but he finds Bucky also blinking sluggishly awake on the pillow beside him, covers shoved down around their waists in the warmth of the late afternoon sun pouring in the windows of the flat. 

“Hi,” Steve says, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth at the sight of Bucky’s frowning, pillow-creased face. 

The lines smooth out of Bucky’s expression as rubs at his eyes, waking a little more. 

“Hi,” he says, and his voice is raspy with sleep. He yawns suddenly, a jaw-cracking motion as his hand flies to cover it. He snuggles back down in the pillows, curling his back like a cat. “I forgot how fucking exhausting it is, being human.” 

Steve laughs. He scoops Bucky into his arms and laughs and laughs, and he knows it’s maybe a little hysterical but he can’t help it. His chest is soaringly light, and right at this moment he thinks that’s the funniest thing anyone’s ever said to him. 

Bucky chuckles too, a little wryly against Steve’s neck as he lets himself be crushed into Steve’s chest while his laughter subsides. 

“What do you want to do?” Steve asks after he gets himself collected. 

“Mmm,” Bucky hums against his throat. “I think…I might be hungry. I kinda forgot about that part too.” 

“Well, I can definitely fix that,” Steve says. “You can stay put.” 

He crawls out from under the sloping ceiling over Bucky, a not entirely graceful process in the cramped space. 

“ _Ooph_ ,” Bucky grunts when Steve’s leg gets tangled in the sheets, catching him in the stomach. “You’re heavy.” 

Steve twists around when his feet find the floor, and lets himself drop a quick kiss to Bucky’s temple for good measure. “Sorry.” 

He goes to his dresser first, and tugs on clean sweats and a t-shirt, managing to locate a spare of everything and tossing it over on top of Bucky, who’s sprawled out to take up the extra space in the bed that Steve vacated. He’d probably be fine with it if Bucky opted to remain naked as the day he was born. _Actually, that’s today, isn’t it?_ Steve thinks with a smile. But he figures he’ll give him the option, assuming nothing. 

Steve’s pantry is as sparse as it usually is, but he rummages through the last of the groceries Angie had forced on him at some point last week and decides he has enough to cobble together some decent sandwiches. He’s grateful—as always—that Angie and Peggy know him well enough that they’d bought him things that wouldn’t expire quickly and also require limited cooking efforts to pull together. And, he thinks with a pleased grin as he melts cheese onto the bread in a pan, that they always bring enough that he could eat for two if he wanted. 

Bucky finally gets up when Steve starts pulling plates and glasses down from the cupboard, stretching hard enough that Steve can hear his back pop from across the flat. 

He doesn’t exactly stop himself from watching, one eye on the grilled cheeses browning in the pan, and the other on the lean, long lines of Bucky’s body as he pulls on Steve’s borrowed clothes. The sweats are a little loose on him, and he has to pull the string tight around his narrower waist. But when he pads over to Steve, drawn by the smell of browning butter, he looks utterly soft and tousled in a way that makes Steve’s stomach drop with the awe of it. 

“It smells good,” Bucky says, leaning over the counter from the other side and watching Steve slide the sandwiches onto plates. “Glad to learn you can cook.” 

Steve laughs, and he finds that he could get used to the feeling. Every time he does it it feels easier, and it makes him want to do it again. “Oh if only you knew. But I can keep you in sandwiches as long as you like, easy.” 

“Okay,” Bucky says, turning his eyes to Steve with an almost shy smile. They’re sky blue again, Steve notes, his heart bounding a little against the walls of his chest. 

They take their plates and glasses of iced tea out onto the stairs of the flat, and sit at the top of them watching the sun descend beyond the garden in a banner of pink and gold. The world seems very hushed and still below them, and Bucky leans his shoulder against Steve’s as they eat. 

“God,” Bucky groans around his first mouthful of sandwich, “I forgot how _fucking good_ food is. Seriously Steve. Faerie shit is all pretty and like, they eat flowers and stuff covered in honey but like, it’s not the _same_. What’s even in this?” 

Steve laughs self-consciously at the praise. “Um…cheddar, mayo, and Black Forest ham. That’s really it. Oh—lots of butter, that helps.” 

“Genius.” Bucky says, happily. “Needing it to survive makes it taste so damn good.” He takes a deep breath of the cool, rose-scented air, closing his eyes. “Everything feels so good. I forgot how much _more_ it was, before.” 

Steve considers the wisdom of that as he takes another bite. It’s true—after too many hours without a meal it does in fact feel like his taste buds are crying with joy, even over something he learned how to make freshman year in the dorms, and on bread that is _just_ this side of stale, no less. 

But maybe the company has something to do with it, too. He drinks in Bucky’s quiet presence by his side, thinking that he needs that as much as he needed the food. 

As they near the last few bites of their sandwiches, Steve can feel the silence between them taking on a more meaningful quality. In fact he thinks he can practically _hear_ when the wheels of Bucky’s mind start turning again, now fueled by cheese and carbs. But he waits for Bucky to speak—it seems right for him to have the first shot at it. At whatever they have to say next. 

When they’ve finished their meal, Bucky sets both of their plates on the ground behind them, and takes Steve’s face in his hands, his expression serious. 

“What can I possibly say Steve? What you—what you did, what you gave for me to be here, I—”

Steve shakes his head as much as he is able between Bucky’s palms cradling it. “Don’t. I—don’t say anything. That’s not what I want from you.” 

Bucky’s eyes search his face, intent. “Then what do you want?”

“I want,” Steve starts, slowly, trying to answer a question he hasn’t even had time to ask himself yet, much less formulate coherent thoughts around. “ _Jesus_ Bucky I don’t know. You don’t _owe_ me anything. I didn’t—it wasn’t about that. I want you to…to have your second shot at whatever _you_ want. To live, for real this time.” 

The idea that Bucky might feel indebted to him, bound to him like he was to the faerie ring or the hawthorn the last time he was spared…Steve can’t abide it. As much as he wants Bucky, that wasn’t what he meant by the trade he’d made. For Bucky to be chained to him.

Bucky’s smile is wistful, and he drops his hands back to his lap and turns his face to look out over the lavender landscape, eyes going distant. “To live again, huh? You make it sound so easy.” He looks back at Steve, chewing on his lower lip. “But you didn’t really answer me. What do _you_ want? Where will you go?”

Steve pushes down the frantic voice that says _you, just you_. He won’t push, not when just having Bucky sitting here beside him, knowing that he did everything he could and more that he didn’t know he could do besides to give him back his life, no matter what that means to him. Steve does his best to consider, truly this time. 

“I think,” he says, slowly, the new idea forming on his tongue as he says it. “I think maybe I’d like to go up to Ireland—to see where my mom grew up. Where I was born. Unless,” he hesitates, “unless you want to go home, maybe? I could take you back to New York, if that’s what you want.” 

Bucky smiles, a little sadly, and shakes his head. “No. It’s not—that’s not home for me, anymore, really. Not without my ma and Becca and…and anything else. It’s just a place I remember, that isn’t the same. I guess I’d like to go, eventually…see their graves and say goodbye. But it’s not a place to land any more, you know?” 

“Yeah.” Steve says, throat suddenly a little tight. “I do know.” 

Bucky takes in a long breath, and slips his arm around Steve’s shoulders, squeezing it in reassurance of his understanding. “Right. Of course you do—sorry.” 

“Me too,” Steve says. He pauses, then plunges forward in a rush. “You could…you could come with me. If you wanted.”

“Do a little wandering?” Bucky asks. He frowns, and Steve holds his breath, waiting for a gentle refusal—for the confirmation that Bucky has things he needs to do to begin his life again, and that he needs to do them on his own. But he surprises Steve with his concern when he speaks again. “Steve—going to Ireland and the—the woods and all, there—it’s not because of what the fae told you, that you think you need to—” he struggles to articulate the question, but Steve understands what he’s asking. 

“No. It’s not for them. She was my mom, Bucky. Doesn’t matter how it happened. And I’d like—I’d like to be close to her, again. I think that’d be a good place to start, in a place she loved.” 

Bucky’s worried frown fades into a smile. “Ah. I think that…would be good.” He doesn’t say that he will come, but he doesn’t say that he won’t, either, and Steve resolves not to force him into the second by pressing him. Not just yet. 

Steve is about to say something more, something about how this stupid, hateful flat he’s treated like a hotel feels more like a home today with Bucky here than anything he’s had in months. He wants to try to put words to the fact that he doesn’t care _where_ he goes, if only Bucky will let them go or stay together. To ask if Bucky feels the same. But Bucky’s face is suddenly being taken over by another massive yawn, and Steve instantly catches it too, and he leans back, trying to cover it. 

They both grin at each other once it passes, and Steve can tell that his eyes probably have matching bags under them to the ones on Bucky’s face. They still haven’t paid the debt of the sleep they’ve missed out on yet. It’s better, maybe, to decide these things in the right order. Wanda was right, they both need rest. 

Beneath them, the little garden has fallen fully into purple twilight, and there are a few stars blinking to life in the sky. On the horizon a blanket of clouds is unfurling itself toward town, and the air is fresh and smells like impending rain. 

“Back to bed?” Steve asks, standing to offer Bucky a hand up. 

“Please,” Bucky says, putting his hand in Steve’s. 

He holds onto it all the way back inside, through stacking the dishes one-handed in the sink, until they can crawl back into the narrow bed and Steve can put both arms around him instead.

It’s the rain, finally hitting the roof of the flat, that wakes Steve up sometime in the night, he thinks at first. It patters over the windows in a way that’s familiar even after many unusually clear days of sunshine.

But then he realizes that no—it wasn’t the rain that woke him. He rolls over, and finds the other half of the admittedly small bed empty. The sheets are still warm from Bucky’s skin, but Steve can’t help the little burst of panic that washes through him. He crawls to the edge and gets up, checking and seeing that the bathroom is empty, door ajar. 

Steve frowns, his heart ticking up its pace as he begins to run through possibilities in his mind. 

He’s prevented from developing an all out panic by the soft snick of the front door opening, and Bucky slips inside. 

“Oh thank god,” Steve says, a little shaky, crossing the flat to him in a few strides. “You went out? Why—” he looks down, and sees that Bucky is cradling something in his hands. 

It’s the little hawthorn cutting in its ceramic pot, which Steve had forgotten all about in the wake of Wanda’s spell and finding Bucky here with him. 

Bucky swallows and ducks his head over the little plant. “I didn’t want to—to leave it out, in the rain.” 

Steve takes a steadying breath, and nods. “Yeah—yeah of course, Buck. Maybe—maybe the windowsill, so it can catch the light in the morning?” 

Bucky nods too, still not meeting Steve’s eyes, his shoulders hunched a little in something like embarrassment. He pads softly over to the window above Steve’s desk, setting the pot and turning it carefully so that the curls of the hawthorn leaves are turned toward the pane. 

“Did I wake you?” Bucky asks, back still to Steve. 

“I—I’m not sure, I guess. But it’s okay. I was just…worried. When you weren’t there.” Steve takes another breath, and it feels more successfully calm this time. “I’m glad you…remembered about that. To bring it in.” 

In all truth he probably would’ve forgotten all about it. But it’s obvious that it was important to Bucky, so he _is_ glad. 

Bucky turns, leaning back against the desk. Steve can’t see his expression from here in the darkness. “You were worried about me?”

Steve lets a long breath out through his nose, and wraps his arms around himself. “Yeah. I think it—it might take a little before…before that goes away. If you—go without telling me.” 

Bucky holds his arms up, beckoning Steve to him, and Steve shuffles forward at once, falling against him. 

“I know,” Bucky whispers, stroking his fingers through Steve’s hair soothingly. “But I’m not going anywhere.” 

Steve sighs against Bucky’s neck. He wants those words to mean something he’s not sure they do. But Bucky’s loss is so fresh, Steve can’t bring himself to ask, not yet. 

He pulls back from Bucky’s arms, trying to gather himself. “You want some tea or something?” He asks, turning toward the kitchen. 

“Okay,” Bucky says softly, staying where he is. 

Steve pulls the kettle from the stove, setting it in the sink to fill. But he lingers for a moment after shutting off the tap, bracing his hands on the counter and knowing himself well enough to know he can’t stay silent. Bucky had _died_. But Steve had had to watch him—are they equal, in the end, the burdens they both have now to give to each other? Steve’s hands grip the edge of the sink, knowing that he’d better decide exactly what he’s going to say before he turns around and spills all of his aching heart out to this man that he loves. 

He doesn’t hear Bucky cross the space between them, beating him to the punch. But then Bucky’s arms are wrapping tight around him, pressing his body flush against Steve’s back, pinning Steve to the counter in front of him. His stubble scrapes along Steve’s neck and Steve leans back into him helplessly. 

“Steve, please,” Bucky whispers, breath hot against the shell of his ear, “please tell me you want this.” His arms are an iron band around Steve’s chest and stomach, fingertips digging into him, and Steve’s mouth drops open, breath hitching as Bucky melts into him. “Maybe you’re just a good man who’d have done as much for anyone in a jam if you could but—but I want to stay with you. I want to live in your damn pocket, I don’t care where we go—Ireland, New York, the fucking end of the earth—tell me the only reason you haven’t asked is some misguided nobility—tell me you’re _mine_.”

Steve breaks free of Bucky’s hold, spinning to face him, to sweep Bucky into his arms, one arm tight around his waist and the other clutching the back of Bucky’s neck. 

“ _Yes_ ,” he breathes, before pulling Bucky’s face toward his, kissing him hard and desperate and _relieved_. 

Bucky’s mouth opens, and they kiss feverishly, Bucky’s lips and tongue sliding hot against his. 

Steve’s body lights up at Bucky’s touch, and the memory of how they’d moved against each other before, longing and desire flooding him. He runs his fingers through the short hair at the nape of Bucky’s neck, unconsciously cataloguing the new, slight differences that remind him that Bucky is really here with him. Bucky’s hands seem to be doing the same, wandering up and down Steve’s back, over the ridges of his ribcage, slipping under his sweater and pressing his hand to Steve’s stomach, making Steve inhale sharply. 

Bucky pulls back and removes his hands from Steve’s shirt, and Steve pants a little at the loss and with the urgency filling him suddenly. But Bucky cups his face, the same way he had on the stairs earlier, only now he’s breathing heavily and his eyes are wide and determined, holding Steve in place. 

“ _Tell_ me—you have to tell me you want this,” he says. 

Steve releases the grip he has around Bucky’s waist and neck, forcing his hands to be still and slow down as he brings them up lightly to cup Bucky’s face, their positions mirrored as they look at one another. 

Steve takes a deep breath, steadying himself against the blood pounding in his veins. Because this is important. “I want this. I want _you_ , I want you to stay with me, go with me, it doesn’t matter—I want you never to leave again.” Steve adds, unable to help himself, “If that’s what you want too.” 

The strained tension in Bucky’s face melts, and he huffs a laugh, tipping forward to press their foreheads together. “You noble idiot. We’ve both _died_ for each other—out of all the impossible things that have happened to us, can’t you just believe I love you?” 

Steve lets out a shuddering sigh, and Bucky’s hands slide down to rest softly on his chest. 

“I love you too,” he whispers. And Bucky sighs too then, and his eyes fall closed. Steve lets his gaze linger over his face another moment, memorizing this moment. He leans in and places a feather-light kiss over each of Bucky’s eyelids, his freckled nose, and then, just as softly, his parted mouth. “I love you. Stay with me.” 

Bucky opens his eyes to meet Steve’s, a smile starting at the corners of his mouth. “Okay,” he says. 

Then he wraps his arms around Steve’s neck, and Steve’s arms go by instinct to pull him firmly against him at the waist, and their mouths find one another again. 

Bucky angles his head at once, and this time he meets Steve with the same urgency, like a dam breaking, deepening the kiss quickly into something hot and demanding, full of need and unspoken promises. 

After a few moments of just that, Steve already feels a little frantic with it, with the desire to prove to both of them that they’re _here_. He rocks his hips against Bucky’s, testing for a reaction to see if Bucky feels the same, and he’s rewarded with a soft groan from the back of Bucky’s throat as Bucky tenses against him. Steve lets his hands fall to Bucky’s hips, tugging him closer to grind into him, shifting a little to slide one of his thighs between Bucky’s. 

Bucky breaks away from the kiss to hide his face in Steve’s neck, letting out a moan that sounds almost pained. 

“Too fast?” Steve asks, easing up on his grip on Bucky’s hip bones. 

“No,” Bucky says, forcefully, pushing his hips harder against Steve so that he can feel Bucky’s hard cock pressing at the inside of his thigh. Steve moans too at that, helplessly dropping his head back to let Bucky kiss up the exposed column of his throat as he grinds them together. “It’s just—it’s like the food, _god_ it’s so much more, now, you’re so—” His lips make their way up to nip at Steve’s earlobe, stubble scraping along Steve’s jaw as he whispers hot in his ear as he continues to rock against Steve’s thigh. “I could come just like this, riding your thigh like a fucking teenager.” 

Steve inhales sharply, slipping his hands under the waistline of Bucky’s sweats to grip at the smooth curve of his ass, pulling him ruthlessly tight until Bucky groans again, his hips moving in stuttering little thrusts against him. 

“You want me to?” Bucky asks, voice low and husky in Steve’s ear, shooting sparks of heat through Steve’s belly. “Want me to beg you?” 

Bucky sucks open-mouthed at the hinge of Steve’s jaw. And Steve’s nerves are on fire but he’s coherent enough to think briefly _there’s a thought_. But he shakes his head—not tonight. He presses forward off the counter, far enough that he can slip his hands out of Bucky’s pants and down the backs of his thighs, lifting him up. Bucky wraps his legs around Steve’s waist, fingers coming up to comb over and over through Steve’s hair and kissing him sloppily as Steve walks him across the flat, ducking carefully under the eave to dump him on the bed. 

Bucky watches him with dark eyes as Steve kneels over him to strip him out of his shirt and sweats, tossing them carelessly aside before discarding his own. 

He lowers himself to cover Bucky’s body with his, settling between Bucky’s legs as Bucky’s head tips back on the pillow, eyes rolling shut at the contact of their flushed skin to skin, pressing himself up into Steve. 

“You never have to beg,” Steve says, tilting in to kiss Bucky one more time, all tongue and teeth, before sliding lower down his body. “I’ll give you anything you want,” he says. He bites gently at one of Bucky’s nipples, and then the other, before following to soothe them with his tongue, and Bucky moans again, threading his fingers into Steve’s short hair. 

He arches helplessly when Steve finally wraps his hand around him, stroking lightly and looking up the lean expanse of Bucky’s body sprawled out beneath him. He slides his other hand up to brace on Bucky’s flat, muscled stomach, feeling the tension there as Bucky tries to hold himself still. Bucky’s looking down at him through his long, dark lashes, and unconsciously swipes his tongue over his roughened bottom lip. 

“Anything,” Steve says again, before he drops his head to take Bucky in his mouth, letting his lips and tongue say more like this than he can manage with words at this moment. 

Bucky is free with his approval, and with the sounds that drop from his throat as Steve takes time to work him down. He doesn’t flatter himself that he’s as much of a natural at this as Bucky is, but Bucky’s moans and his fingers clenching and unclenching in Steve’s hair tell him when he’s doing something right. Eventually he slides his hand off Bucky’s stomach, down to clutch again at his ass, letting Bucky thrust a little forward into his mouth as he nears his climax. 

It’s when Bucky goes utterly silent, but for the heavy breaths through his nose, that Steve knows he’s on the edge. And it fills him with something hot and possessive, this new knowledge of Bucky. He’s going to learn all of it—all the ways to make Bucky moan and shiver under his hands and mouth, all the ways to make him go silent like that—his mouth dropping open on a final quiet gasp of pleasure when he comes. 

Both of Steve’s hands find their way under Bucky, kneading into the muscle as he tenses and shivers, until Bucky comes down all the way. Then he smooths his hands up Bucky’s thighs with a sigh. 

Bucky is boneless and quiet for a moment, and Steve rests his cheek on Bucky’s hipbone. 

But then he reaches down for Steve, fingers grasping at his shoulders. 

“Come’ere,” he commands, voice rasping. 

Steve obeys, crawling up Bucky’s body until Bucky rolls him over, reversing their positions, and letting Bucky’s weight press him down against the mattress as they chase his own pleasure to its end.

The next time they wake up, it isn’t gentle at all. In fact, Steve jerks upright and smashes his forehead into the low ceiling for the first time since he’d trained himself out of it in his early days here.

Bucky is also sitting up, and they look confusedly at each other for a moment, brains foggy with sleep. 

But then Steve recognizes the loud, insistent sound that had pulled them so rudely from their rest. _Meowing_. A very vocal, very determined cat is making itself known at the door to the flat. As he registers the noise, he hears a low scratching join with the cat’s yelling. 

“What the fuck?” Steve says. 

“You got a cat?” Bucky asks, thickly. “Think it wants in.” 

“I do not have a cat.” 

Bucky shrugs, rolling to the side of the bed and yanking on his sweatpants to stand. “Think it still wants in.” 

Steve follows after him, pulling on his own discarded sweatpants against the early morning chill. It’s just past sunrise, he thinks, judging by the dim blue light in the flat. Cats are very inconsiderate animals, he decides with a huff of annoyance. 

They open the door, standing side by side as if preparing to greet a guest. But Steve figures they’re both just curious. The cat, which had been standing on its hind legs to better scratch at the wooden door frame, immediately prances back, chirping brightly at them in a way that sounds absurdly like _good morning_. 

“Good morning to you too,” Bucky says, voice dry. The cat, whose long red coat is gleaming in the early sunshine, steps toward him to twine around his legs. Steve blinks at it, trying to remember if he’s seen it around before. 

He gets distracted by a large manila envelope beside it, with the words _For Steven Grant Rogers_ written on the front in spidery letters. 

Steve bends down to pick it up, and the cat flashes him a look with its luminous green eyes. It meows again, something that sounds like a command. Then it bumps its glossy head once more against Bucky’s shins, and turns to streak off down the stairs. Steve’s eyes track its path through the garden, and it pauses a final time perched on top of the fence, looking at them over its shoulder. And then it’s gone, disappearing down the other side and back out into the pale morning. 

“What is that?” Bucky asks, looking at the envelope in his hand. 

“Not sure,” Steve says, flipping it over to slit open the flap as he turns back into the apartment. “Come back in, it’s freezing out.” 

Bucky shuts the door as Steve opens the envelope beside his desk, letting the contents spill out onto the top of it. There’s several official looking papers and a little blue bound passport, and Steve’s confusion and alarm mounts as he looks at them. But last, a thick folded page of handmade paper, rough and heavy with the faint traces of leaves, slides out. It’s addressed to him in the same fine, spindly hand as the envelope. Steve picks it up and reads. 

_Steven Grant Rogers,_

_I still think Wanda harbors a foolish amount of sentiment, all things considered. But I also happen to know that however much she loves humans, she exercises almost no common sense about how your world works. Since she took it on herself to help you as a fae might, I figured I might as well pick up the slack and finish the job. Tell James Buchanan Barnes that I want him to be well, even if he has to do it in a lesser form than he enjoyed before._

_Natasha_

The signature is spiky and looping, but strangely unsteady—and Steve imagines it’s the product of a hand that doesn’t put a pen to paper very often. 

He looks up at the other contents of the envelope, which Bucky is leafing through with a look of mixed wonder and rueful affection. Steve hands him the letter, which Bucky scans quickly, the affection taking over the wonder. 

“Passport, social security, birth certificate—she even got my birthdate right, aside from the fake year.” Bucky says, mouth twisting sideways as he sets the letter down beside them. “I didn’t know she knew it. But I guess that’s Natasha for you—knows more than she lets on, cares more than she’d ever admit to.” 

“How—I mean why would she—?” Steve asks. His lingering feelings about Natasha are not positive ones, and he’s having a hard time reconciling the gesture in front of him with the unyielding, black-eyed fae. 

Bucky shrugs with a sigh. “Because she can? And because as much as she hates being surprised or having the rug pulled out from under her, that also…doesn’t happen to her very often. She probably didn’t want you or Wanda getting the last word if she could land one herself.” 

“But these are—I mean they look real to you, right?” Steve asks, feeling the seal on the passport. “How’d she get them?” 

Bucky laughs, cuffing him on the shoulder. “Honestly Steve, you brought me back from my second death—forged government documents is where you draw the magical line?” 

“I guess…” Steve says, dubiously. Though in all honesty the more that he thinks about the more he realizes the enormity of this gift. He hadn’t even begun to think yet about the world beyond the flat—how he and Bucky would actually do anything or even just _be_ when Bucky had supposedly been dead since 1944. With this they won’t have to worry about any of it. They really can just pick up wherever they want. They can _exist_ , and prove it in all the mundane, bureaucratic ways that matter, too. 

Bucky drops his head to place a kiss on Steve’s bare shoulder, hand curling around his bicep. 

“I’m really here, Steve. On paper and everything.” He slides his other arm around Steve’s waist, steering him back toward the bed. “Thank god I don’t make any money, I’d have to file a tax return.” 

“You know what this means?” Steve asks as they crawl back under the covers, both a little shivering and goose-pimpled in the cold. 

“What does it mean?” Bucky asks, humoring him even as he sticks his icy toes under Steve’s. 

“We can really—” he laughs, all the possibilities now occurring to him, all the problems that he would’ve realized they had to face in a day or two when they left this bubble, and which are now cut off at the pass. He might not be able to think of Natasha with affection, but he’s not going to look a gift horse in the mouth either. It was the least she could do, and he’s grateful. “We can really do anything.”

“What have you got in mind, Rogers?” Bucky asks, voice going coy as his eyes drop to Steve’s lips before flicking back up. 

“Anything,” Steve says eagerly, “we’ll go to Ireland and then we’ll—we’ll travel all over, I’ve got some savings and we can just—we’ll go everywhere, and then we’ll go back to New York and, and…” he trails off, a wild thought crossing his mind. Bucky blinks up at him, mouth parted slightly and hair mussed from twenty-four hours of bedhead and Steve’s fingers. Before he can pause to think about it he snatches up Bucky’s hands in his, pressing them to his chest. “Marry me.” His breath comes shallow with excitement, tumbling on in a rush. “Meet my friends. We’ll buy a place somewhere and settle down and I’ll do all your tax returns for you forever even if you never make a dime.” 

Bucky stares back at him, and he blinks rapidly, eyes glistening. “That—that offer on the level?” His voice is steady but a little lower than it had been before. 

“Every word,” Steve says, gripping Bucky’s hands tighter, holding his breath. 

“Well then,” Bucky says, tipping his head down to brush his lips over Steve’s knuckles, twined with his. “I accept. You got an order in mind?” 

Steve shakes his head, smile breaking over his face. “All of it at once—whatever you want.” 

“You’re crazy,” Bucky says, with a laugh that sounds as giddy as Steve feels. He sobers, laugh fading into a smile that twitches at the corners, something much more tender. “All of it sounds…just about right.” 

Bucky frees his hands from Steve’s and reaches up to wrap around the back of his neck, pulling him down to the pillows. 

Steve closes his eyes tight and kisses him.

There is a faerie tale of sorts, though it’s one known only by the Fair Folk themselves and a few others who know that they can’t tell it.

It goes like this. 

Two men, born seven blocks and seven decades away from one another, cross an ocean and a ring of toadstools to meet. Inside of a magic ring, they fall in love. 

One faces death twice, and accepts his chance at a third. One learns that he might never die, and chooses instead the certainty of an ending for the possibility that they might make it a happy one. 

And they do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A HUGE thanks again to starshieldfolder for allowing me to explore this world based on her gorgeous art, and to the CapRBB 2019 squad for putting on this event! 
> 
> You can reblog the art [here](https://starshieldfolder.tumblr.com/post/185002757061/entry-for-the-caprbb-2019-and-now-part-of-an) and [here](https://starshieldfolder.tumblr.com/post/185225147686/second-piece-for-the-caprbb-2019-based-on-the), or the fic masterpost [here](https://odette-and-odile.tumblr.com/post/185242145203/under-the-hawthorn-tree-by-odette-and-odile-art) if you feel like it!
> 
> And another final huge thank you to all of you who have been commenting and kudosing and letting me know what you think, you guys are the real superstars that makes this kind of thing so fun to do. So happy you came to live in this story with me for a little while. I try to reply to comments as much as I can, but in case I missed you know that I SO APPRECIATE all of them!
> 
> If you like, you can also find me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/odetteandodile) these days, and I would love to hear from any of you!

**Author's Note:**

> Please let me know what you think in the comments!! I love knowing what you're thinking as you go, and this one will have some twists before we're through ;) 
> 
> Also, if you're enjoying this feel free to [reblog on tumblr!](url)
> 
> I'm still over there, but even more so on [twitter](https://twitter.com/odetteandodile) where many stucky peeps migrated and we have a fun thirsty time, come join us!


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